One key aspect to creating a website that wows your future visitors and leaves a lasting impression is by ensuring that your awesome brand is present and consistent.
Whether you’ve already built your website and are looking to spruce it up, or you’re still in the planning stages – consider adding your brand into these 4 super simple spots on your website to make sure it really shines through!
Navigation and footer
One of the easiest, and possibly the most visible, spots to incorporate your branding into your website is in your main navigation bar, as well as your website footer (the solid bar of color at the bottom of the page).
Choose one of your brand colors and set both your navigation menu background and the footer background to that color – use the same color for both.
Then be sure to assign any fonts in these sections to use one of your brand fonts – I recommend using your brand’s body font (the font you use for paragraph text), because that’s likely to be your easiest to read font.
Buttons
The next really easy spot you can (and should!) add your branding into your website is your buttons.
This one is important to do the right way.
While you want your buttons to match your brand and your website, you don’t want your buttons to blend in. In order for a button to be effective and entice people to click, they need to stick out and be obvious.
Take a look at your color palette as well as your website, and determine what color within your color palette will “pop” the most on your website. For example, in the case of my website and brand, here’s my brand color palette:
The blues are my main brand colors that I use more liberally throughout, and the oranges are my “pop” colors that I use for my buttons because they reallly stand out against the blues!
Then you also want to use a brand font in the buttons – similar to my recommendation above, I would recommend using your body font for the text in your buttons.
Lastly, you should decide if you want your button fonts to be UPPERCASE, lowercase, or Sentence Case. My personal preference is uppercase, but choose whatever is consistent with your overall brand.
Headings
A great thing about websites is that in many cases, you can customize the style and appearance of your headings with just a couple clicks of a button. Assuming you used your headings consistently throughout your website and didn’t individually customize each one (you really shouldn’t do that!) then you can make this change in a snap!
When customizing your headings, you want to first set the font to use your brand’s designated heading font.
Next, you can further customize the heading style by assigning a color (again, from your brand color palette), and also other settings such as bold, italics, UPPERCASE, lowercase, or l e t t e r s p a c i n g.
The small details
Sometimes it’s the small details that can really tie it all together. By adding your branding into even the less significant pieces of your website (without going totally overboard) you can really bring your website to a whole new level.
Here are a few of the smaller details of your website where you might wish to tie in your brand colors/fonts:
- Hyperlinks
- Divider lines
- Blog post images
- Social media icons
- Favicon (the little icon in your browser tab)
- Blog sidebar
Take a look at which of these you already have on your website, and if they don’t already match your brand – change ‘em up!
Keep in mind that not every website will have all of these small details, and you certainly don’t need to add them in if you don’t already have them. Just take a look at what you already have, and fix those up!
