Branding Your Business: Company Webpages, Social Content, Aesthetics and Design

A thoughtful Business Owner or Company that is going to be successful in the new Digital Economy - will take the time to improve their Internet Marketing efforts; as well as develop an active Social-Media-Presence. 

A good first step for a business owner is to start out with creating or extending their Comprehensive Brand for their company offline, and then adopting that image for their online presence. A well-planned business strategy for doing online marketing, should include creating a thoughtfully Branded and well-designed Company Webpage or Website.  

Once a company has developed their own webpage with their own unique characteristics or brand, that image should be carried or extended into their social media efforts. Uniformity, color, contrast, content emphasis, aesthetics, brand and design, should all be developed with the target market – your potential consumers - in mind.  

The following websites (Apple, Ford, and Toyota) are good examples of well-designed, well planned and thoughtfully Branded Business Images, which keeps the consumer engaged and interested in the marketing materials. 

On these business marketing websites you will see it's easy for a visitor to locate and find social-media-icons and other webpage-links, which are conveniently located near the top of their webpage banners and/or in the bottom of the footers on each of these popular company's webpages, for easy navigation to social media and other key website sections. 

Each company’s website and their various webpages are highly branded, uniform and consistent; so the user does not get confused, and they know confidently that they are on the correct webpage. Logos, banners, and titles for each page are highly visible; and the paragraphs, fonts, text, spacing, or images, vary within the content, which helps to show contrasts within the reading materials. 

The entire website is pleasing to the visitor's eyes. We can also recognize the consistent branding and we will see these colors, logos, slogans and other themes located elsewhere in their business marketing efforts - whether through advertising offline, or online, and in their actual business locations. The branding is uniform throughout all communications with the public and their customers.   

The following small businesses and their websites (TEC Welding Products, Swagelok, G-Force Pace Cars, and Permaculture / Raising Chickens) have some work to do with branding their internet presence. All four business–websites are guilty to varying degrees for failing to be consistent with their social media, company branding, or visual aesthetics; some of them are showing little or no content uniformity within their webpage designs.  

Two of the businesses (Tec Welding, G-Force Pace Cars) are apparently not using or linking to any social media at all, and they do not seem to be  trying to create any kind of interactive two-way social communications with their customers (except with the traditional use of an email link). 

“G-Force Pace Cars” has some YouTube videos embedded into their company webpage, but it makes no apparent efforts to have their visitors participate through the social media; and there are no links to any other social websites. Also the text paragraphs with their business related content are misaligned and the words are centered wrong – giving the webpage a cluttered look with a non symmetrical web design. The homepage is really long with its length (and it does not provide any kind of return-to-the-top link), and the content is bunched up and very crowded; which makes web-links hard to see as they are not clearly marked. “Tec Welding Products” also have failed to link or utilize any social media marketing tools to attract any socially inclined consumers; and they too have misaligned the textual-content in a fashion that causes a cluttered look. Spacing is crowded with their web links bunched up on the left hand side; Images and pictures are bunched up together against the paragraphs. Uniformity of their brand and content is badly lacking for both of these two small business sites. 

The other two business websites (Swagelok, Permaculture) are improving with their utilization of social media tools, and although hard to find, they have at least placed a few social media icons somewhere on their webpages:

The Swagelok Company Website is the better example of the four small businesses, with the development of some organized branding. They have been able to better manage their content alignment and some of their basic website aesthetics. But the web design still has some element crowding issues with their content placement and images; the small, plain looking text appears to make the content look fairly boring.  Little contrast is seen between the use of the font sizes and other objects. It needs to have some more differentiation amongst its various webpage elements.  

The other business (Permaculture - “Raising Chickens”) is a blogging website that is about “Perma-Culture,” - whatever that might be.  It is very confusing as it is not clearly marked. It has no logo or outstanding webpage titles, to tell us what the website content might be, nor does it indicate clearly what we are about to be reading. The fonts are all the same throughout the page, and even at the start of some of the webpage titles, the paragraph-sentences are not capitalized.  Also the paragraph spacing and other elements are very random and it looks long and difficult to read. 

In summary as you can see with some of the differences in these seven examples, compared between Apple Computer, two major car companies Toyota and Ford, as well as the four smaller more disorganized local businesses. There is a lot to be gained for your success and your company's customer-outreach efforts, when you can develop your offline, online, and overall image or brand-marketing together. And when combined with a matching social media presence that is appealing, relevant, uniform, socially interactive, and visually consistent with your brand. You will ensure you can control your online image, as well as be found across all the new and old media channels.