If you completed last week’s brand personality profile, then you have a good idea of what to work from for your brand design. If you’re working with a designer, they will find this very helpful. Here are 7 design tips for rebranding your site.
Keep it simple.
There are a million and 1 fun elements you can include in your site. It’s tempting to include a little of everything, but you should really think twice about whether or not it is adding real value for your visitors. Your message and brand should not be covered up by extraneous “stuff”.
Leave room to breathe.
In design, the space is at least as important as the other elements. You don’t want your content to suffocate. Let it breathe.
Stay consistent.
1. Pick 3 fonts to stick to. More than 3 fonts tends to look disjointed and unfocused. You can trick people into thinking you know what you’re doing with something as simple as just keeping your fonts consistent and minimal. 2. Style your images the same way. I’m still experimenting with how I want to do this…
Design to support your goal.
Do you want your visitors to especially read certain posts or pages? Buy a product? Subscribe to your newsletter? Connect with you somewhere else online? You can’t expect visitors to poke around and guess what you want them to do. They don’t have time. You also can’t expect people to do a bunch of different things – you should decide your top thing you want your visitors to do and design with that in mind.
Incorporate something unexpected.
Who doesn’t love a little surprise? We are in the middle of redoing our site, and there is soooo much to do that it just makes me feel stressed to think about it. One of the things is adding back in some fun personality. This is the image that used to be in our header and I really miss it because it was such a ridiculously simple surprise element, but David wasn’t a big fan and we need something new. Still brainstorming about that…
Brand for longevity.
Consider getting a logo for your blog. I see blogs changing up their looks alllll the time to the point that I wouldn’t even recognize the blog if it wasn’t the same URL. (We’ve been doing this for awhile because I’ve been floundering around trying to decide on our brand.) The idea is to have a logo and basic site that stays the same, while you can periodically freshen up some of the elements. If you want to build some brand equity you don’t want to be changing up your whole look every few months. Like I said, I’m an offender myself, so until you decide on your brand, I forgive you (but FYI, you’re not going to land on your brand by just experimenting, you’re going to have to go through the steps to nail down who you want to be and why 😉
Develop user-friendly navigation.
If you spend time creating great content for your site, there is nothing more lame than no one being able to find it. I’m going a little crazy right now because that’s another one of the things that desperately needs doing here on the site. Seriously people, it’s driving me batty. Establish what your visitors want to know and the best way for them to find that information. This is something we’re going to delve into in depth next week!
