We’re a holistic branding company.
A brand is defined by how your customers see a whole bunch of different aspects of your business (your voice, vision, and values) working in tandem with one another.
So when we take on a branding project, we often find that we’re recreating the website branding for our clients along with the general look and tone of voice for all of their outwardly reaching content (emails, articles, social posts etc).
What is Website Branding?
Unless you’re a brick and mortar shop, your website is the main hub for all the things you do. It’s where you communicate your value, it’s where your customers can buy things, and where you drive most of your traffic.
That means it’s not just the hub for your business, it’s the hub for your brand. It’s your brand platform.
Now, you won’t find the term “website branding” in a dictionary or a typical “how to build my website” google search (unless it brought you here) because this isn’t something that most people talk about. It’s assumed by branding specialists and it’s virtually unknown (but expected) by everyone else.
Website branding is simply the cohesion of branding throughout your brand. How you refer to the brand (we v I v they), consistency in your logo, and how you communicate should stay consistent throughout your entire website.
And that consistency sets the foundation for the rest of your marketing initiatives (not the other way around). As a brand, everything you build starts from what you portray and house on your website.
Building a Brand is Like Building a House.
It’s a lot easier to build a new house with all of the features you want than it is to inherit a house that you hate and renovate the shit out of it.
Believe me, the renno seems like an easier plan, but it’s not. Aside from the fact that tearing down walls is satisfying and before and after pictures are insta-gold, a renovation project starts with a ton of unknowns and unexpected issues. It always takes longer than you think it will and there’s a very real chance that your perfect home ends up being juuust a little wonky.
A website is no different. When you build one without the branding in mind, you’ll have a ton of page edits, and copy updates to make. You’ll have to change colors everywhere (so many hex codes) and make sure that everything has the right imagery. Plus there’s a good chance that there’s unbranded or off brand, incohesive content somewhere that is confusing as all hell for your potential buyer.
If you’re starting from scratch, you can make sure to take time and focus on your website branding AS YOU GO. And by the time you’re finished with the basic pages of your website, you also have a deeper understanding of your brand and you’ll be able to communicate what you do much better with your brand voice.
How to Build Your Website with Branding in Mind
I’m not going to beat around the bush with this one – to do this right, you have to define your brand conceptually before you go out and build your website.
If you have your brand concept down –
– that is, you know exactly what you want it to look like and sound like, you know just what you want your customer to feel and you have a pretty good idea of how to do that –
– then the next part is going to be easy because you already have most of the decisions made for you.
By adhering to your own conceptual roadmap and following our step by step process, you’ll have a well-branded website in just a couple of weeks.
Building Your Brand Website – The Bloom Your Brand Course
If you’ve been around for a while, you know that we have a five session branding course that will teach you our entire methodology for building your brand organically.
Session two is all about building your website.
Yeah, BUILDING a branded website. Because our course is a hands on, start to finish how-to, we’re actually going to share our methodology for building your website from scratch. This isn’t like any other branding course because we’re not teaching you how to change your logo or your tone – we’re teaching you to infuse your brand with your values as you build it.
We’ve spent years trying to find the best, most efficient course of action for putting a website together (honestly, the course is worth it in just the time we’ll save you Googling). This isn’t an amalgamation of random articles or research. This is years of experience, compiled into a step by step process.
We even ACTUALLY create brands using this structure so you can watch how we really do it and get insight into how branding experts think as we’re putting together a website.
In fact, we make it so easy that if you wanted to, your whole site setup will take you a couple of hours – then you can get to building your site with all the proper website branding!
Fairwarning though, if you don’t have a brand concept in mind, or you don’t know what you’re going to sell, this is going to be a tough session to complete. Our method assumes that when you enter Session Two, that you have the foundational steps from Session One completed and you’re starting to think like a Brand Bloomer.
Interested in learning how to build a branded website from scratch?
References:
BRAND A-Z: an interactive dictionary of 1000 essential brand terms.
