Whether you are a self-employed blogger or an enterprise business, having a great website with compelling content is a necessity. It’s important to maintain your brand throughout your site so your customers become familiar with you and can recognize your work anywhere.
WordPress has remained the leading CMS platform for years among businesses, professionals, and individuals. So, the tried and tested best practices, and effective creative principles are always at your disposal. Learning from many brands that utilized the WordPress, here are tips on how to make a consistent brand.
1. Choose an appropriate theme
The look and feel of a WordPress website depends on the theme you have chosen. WordPress provides thousands of free and premium themes. You can find any theme to fit your needs. Your theme should also define the navigation layout, widgets, and accessibility of other features. So, choosing a theme is of paramount importance.
- Choose a theme that can be customized with brand elements easily.
- Look for themes with inbuilt search engine optimization to drive web traffic.
- A secure theme to prevent intrusions from malicious plugins and malware.
- The theme should also accommodate running several websites with a similar UI.
- Choose an appropriate theme that can remain consistent with your mobile app as well. Consult the expert mobile app developers having experience in turning WordPress sites into mobile apps.
2. Select the right plugins
WordPress allows you to incorporate features and functions through a multitude of plugins. There are thousands of free, paid, and freemium plugins available for every different purpose. Some plugins allow you to opt initially for free and upgrade to the paid one as your business scales up in growth. Here are some tips for choosing plugins.
- You need a caching plugin to prevent the website from crashing.
- An SEO plugin to guide you perfecting on-page SEO elements to boost search ranks.
- You also need an anti-spam plugin to prevent the spread of harmful links through comments or other user-generated contents.
- You need to choose only a set of relevant plugins and should not use too many of them as this can slow down the website speed.
- You should only use well-coded plugins from reputed publishers to prevent performance and security issues.
3. Content, content, content
Content is still the driving force for most digital brands. The same remains true with WordPress websites. Because there is so much content out there, it’s important to provide a variety. Creating informational videos or long-form blog posts will allow you to reach your customers in different ways. Here are some useful tips.
- Provide a mixed bag of relevant content comprising of text, images, graphics, infographics, short explanatory videos, etc.
- Boost readability by dividing a piece into sections with heads, sub-heads, and bullet points. Always use small paragraphs along with visually enlarged quotations and images to boost “at a glance” readability.
- Provide in-depth pieces instead of short articles with no unique information and analysis.
- Make interactive comments, ask questions, use statistics and use numbered lists to keep users engaged.
4. Must-have pages
Every WordPress website boasting a brand should build credibility with a set of important information. Your website apart from being a content reserve on many subjects should also inform users directly about your business, product, service, or company. This requires creating the following sections and pages.
- About Us Page: It should tell users what your brand is all about along with a brief history of the brand.
- Contact Us Page: On this page, there should be practical information about the corporate and registered addresses, phone number, email addresses, and social profile links.
- Blog: WordPress started as a blogging platform and offers very robust support. To showcase your expertise with the niche, there should be a blog that’s regularly updated with relevant and unique contents.
- Portfolio: If you are providing a service or making products, the portfolio section or the page should boast about your works. The portfolio should list the most important products with thumbnail photographs and a little description of the brand you worked for.
5. Go viral with social sharing
You cannot make your brand heard without the help of social sharing. Providing the links of your social pages in the contact section and allowing users to share on social platforms are not enough. You need a robust strategy to build and nurture a social audience. Here are some useful tips.
- Engage in social conversations on a regular basis with frequent posts, comments, replies, and reactions.
- Try to include some social influencers in your circle to create relevant conversations.
- Use social messaging platforms to stay in touch with existing customers and connected social profiles.
- Encourage people to give an opinion and share contents on a regular basis.
6. Integrating an email subscription
Finally, email marketing is a trusted avenue to build up brand credibility and connection. For this, you need to create an email list. You can do it on your own or can avail a professional service like MailChimp.
After creating the email list, you have to integrate the email subscription feature with your website. This is normally done through a variety of means like contact forms, footer bar, or some plugins.
- Create an attractive landing page asking for a newsletter or email subscription.
- Give your emails personalized tweaks as per the individual recipient.
- Send rich emails with appropriate visual contents, layout and design boosting readability and instantly engaging message.
- Grab quality email marketing tools to reach a wider audience quickly.
Conclusion
Finally, your branding should not remain exposed to sudden crashes and performance issues beyond your control. To prevent unwanted data loss, always use a backup plugin and schedule backups at regular intervals.
Juned Ghanchi
Juned Ahmed is an IT consultant by profession and is working with Indianappdevelopers.com, leading app developers in India. He has more than 8 years of experience in developing and implementing marketing strategies.
The post 6 Ways to Make Sure Your WordPress Site Reflects Your Brand appeared first on Torque.
