Protect your Brand When Redesigning your Website

Branding is a complex process, but a recognized brand helps a customer to make smart decisions in less time. Even though it is just a symbol, a brand can be the biggest asset of a business organization. And evidently, a good brand increases the value of organization and the website representing a business.

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It doesn’t matter whether you are constructing a large, highly-functional website or a small personal blog, but it is the brand that keeps your website apart and reminds a customer of your website. Actually, the effect is mutual, the way you design or do changes to your website can also impact your brand. Let’s say you want to improve SEO rankings for your website, or currently thinking about revamping the appearance of your website, it’s obvious you change whatever comes before your eyes. Even though your motivations are good, it can have a negative impact on your brand as even the slightest change on the smallest element on your website design will reflect on the brand.

Things to know when Redesigning a Website

So, in case, if you are thinking of redesigning your existing website for any specific requirement, either for improving site responsiveness or SEO ranking, you should consider these factors before you can take any step.

Understanding different aspects of web design are important as we are speaking about a website as a whole, so each individual elements count.

• Your Site’s Logo

• A well-established brand in hand, you should take things smoothly before you make any sort of variations, speaking of which your logo is one of the first things people notice when they get on your website.
• The generally accepted norm is a logo should be positioned in the upper left area of a web page. A logo gives a visual representation of a company’s values, purpose, mission, and thus can impact your website popularity and of course the brand. So anytime if are planning on reworking on the color, text, font or the complete overall design, it should be done with great care.

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• Logo redesign, it should be carried out only if it’s necessary.  Nike’s checkmark logo is a perfect example how they have protected their core business values even after been around for so many years.

• The Website Experience

• Web design affects user-experience and that impacts your brand. If a customer lands on your website just because of your brand only to be greeted by a slow-loading web page, it will damage your brand reputation.
• Recently when Facebook made some changes the way Messenger works, many users threatened to stop using the app. The changes may appear very subtle but can have a huge impact on users as in this case. It might be a website or an application, if the changes you make even have a minute impact on functionality, it will change the way users think about your brand.

• Color Schemes

• There are so many discussions about color psychology and how it impacts a customer; we ought to know by this time that if we are planning website redesigning, the colors should not be picked randomly that don’t speak your brand.
• Colors impact the mood of customers, as it has a subconscious association with various things and characteristics and that includes even your brand. Now let’s say your website had a combination of yellow and white and out of the blue you have redesigned your website with purple shade and such changes people will neither accept nor appreciate.
• The same applies to your brand; take any popular brand, the structure, color, tone, and even the text used will be appropriate and relevant. So it would be a good idea if you comprehensively check what each color means before you can implement them on your brand or website.

• Elements that Encourage Recall

• It can be comprehended as adding a character of your brand. Your brand has something that should be reflecting on your website. It can be images, videos, or any other element that customer can recall and connect with your brand.
• Redesigning your website, you have to take this as an opportunity to work on this factor again and make things work for you. Now if you feel you need some better explanation for this, and then check the website of Volvo, their brand speaks safety and reliability, and even the images they have used sings the same tune.
• Customers visiting the website will easily understand and connect with the brand because they have something to associate with.

• Monitoring Website Credibility

• It’s true that websites with old-school design can even make a brand stagnant. And according to Stanford University, 75% of people judge the credibility of a company based on the design of its website.
• The design of a website which maintains a logical flow helps to build brand credibility. People will remember the experience they have taken from your website and associate themselves with your brand.
• Website refresh is good; it helps to rebuild the character of a site, but the fact that should not be missed here is that it also builds the brand. A bad, cluttered website design can damage the credibility of your brand. Thence good care should be taken not to divert your visitor’s attention away from your site.

• Maintaining Consistency

• A website is not boring if you can find consistency in its design. If you ask any professional web designer, consistency is crucial for them because they know that if there is no design consistency then visitors will feel disconnected and may lose interest to keep around anymore.
• If there is a plan to redesign your website, make sure it is consistent in every term. The consistency of website can be defined in terms of the colors used throughout the website, vertical and horizontal spacing between the elements, presence of navigation menus in the same place, and much more.
• Whatever changes you do, it should reflect consistently on every web page, only then your brand will retain its identity.