With so many websites competing for attention, your own site’s branding can mean the difference between success and failure. For this reason, it’s more important than ever to create strong and unique branding for your online presence.
To do that, it helps to understand the most essential branding elements for your website. Careful use of these elements — such as a unique logo, the right typography, and high-quality images — can help your website stand out from the crowd.
In this post, we’ll discuss the importance of creating strong and unique branding for your WordPress site. Then we’ll explore four of the most crucial branding elements, and offer some tips for how to incorporate each one on your site. Let’s get to it!
Why Creating Strong and Unique Branding Is Crucial for Your Website
Your brand is much more than the products you sell and your mission statement. While those elements are certainly important, they are merely a part of the overall impression you offer to potential customers.
In other words, your brand is how you represent your business and everything that goes into it:
A cohesive brand identity can help you find recognition in the marketplace. It can also establish trust with your customers, which can eventually lead to loyal and lasting relationships for years to come.
As far as your website is concerned, it is often how customers will first experience your brand. The impression they get from it may mean the difference between provoking their interest and turning them away. If your branding is unique and exciting, this should help visitors connect with it, and encourage them to further explore your products.
4 Essential Branding Elements for Your WordPress Site
Nailing the branding on your website involves bringing a number of different pieces together into a cohesive message. Below, we’ll discuss four essential elements to help make the branding on your WordPress site the best it can be. Let’s take a look!
1. Create a Logo to Establish Your Brand Identity
Your logo represents your brand’s identity. A well-designed logo can communicate your brand’s style and focus in an instant. For that reason, it should be an important part of your website.
An effective logo can help visitors remember your company and your site. Even if they forget everything else, you want them to be able to associate the logo with your company when they see it in the future.
Google is a perfect example of this in action. Its logo is deceptively simple – the name of the company in a branded font and colors:
Since images are often remembered more easily than names, your logo may be the most important part of your website’s brand identity. Fortunately, many WordPress themes have pre-designed locations where you can place a logo easily.
As far as designing your logo is concerned, there are also plenty of tools available to help you get started, such as Looka:
This logo maker uses a non-templated approach to create hundreds of unique logos based on your specifications. You can then choose the best options, and tweak them until you have one that’s perfect for your business. This makes it simple for even non-designers to end up with something stylish and unique.
2. Choose a Color Scheme That Evokes a Positive Response
Color is another important element you’ll want to put some thought into when creating your website. Colors are powerful, and different ones can provoke various feelings. This is why your color scheme deserves a fair bit of consideration.
For example, think about the color red. It comes with a number of associations, such as error, stop, and danger. If you’d rather people not associate these types of things with your brand, it might be best to avoid this color.
On the other hand, the right color can be very powerful. Some shades even become iconic for a particular brand. Consider Facebook, for instance:
The particular shade of blue used for Facebook’s logo and website design is recognized all over the world. The same is true for many large businesses.
When coming up with a color scheme for your own website, it can help to do some research into color psychology. Once you’ve chosen a color or two, remember to use it frequently in your site’s design, and in other key elements such as your logo.
3. Use Typography That Compliments Your Brand
Another important element for your website is the fonts it employs. Just as with color, fonts can evoke various emotions and responses in your visitors.
While it may sound like a simple task, choosing the perfect font scheme can be a bit intimidating. After all, there are a lot of options available, and the fonts you choose need to mesh well with the other elements on your site.
Sony does an excellent job of using its font choices effectively:
Here, the designers have obviously thought about what types of fonts not only align with the kinds of products the company represents, but also with the branded font used in its logo. As a result, the font choices are simple and readable, yet feel appropriate to the core audience.
It’s vital that your fonts are easy to read and understand. Generally, it’s also best to use fonts that don’t draw too much attention to themselves. After all, it’s your content that you want visitors to notice, not your typefaces.
4. Select Images That Fit Your Brand’s Style
Finally, your images should align with all the other elements you’ve included on your website. Whether you’re using stock images or your own photos, it’s important to think about where you’re placing them, how big they are, and their general visual style.
For example, if you make sales online, the images of your products should be consistent with each other. If they vary in quality, or the framing is different for each one, your website could look disjointed and unprofessional.
Square avoids this problem neatly on its website:
This site uses a minimalistic design to keep visitors’ attention on its content, with images that are incorporated throughout. On top of that, each image is of a similar style, including light colors and clear-cut framing that features the company’s products in action.
When it comes to designing a website, it’s critical to establish an overall style, and that includes your images. Use the same editing techniques for each one, and look to create consistency through colors, subjects, and so on.
Conclusion
Strong and unique branding can help you establish connections and loyalty with your customer base. In other words, a cohesive brand identity can sometimes mean the difference between success and failure.
In this post, we’ve discussed four essential branding elements for your WordPress website. To quickly recap, they are:
- Create a logo to establish your brand’s identity.
- Choose a color scheme that evokes a positive response.
- Use typography that compliments your brand.
- Select images that fit your brand’s style.
If you have a question about branding elements for your WordPress website, we’re here to help. Ask away in the comments section below!
Image credit: rawpixel.
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