5 tips to improve your website this week (7) | Heart Internet Blog – Focusing on all aspects of the web

A new week is upon us so we’ve got another 5 great tips to help you Power Up your website. This week, we’re focussing on what you can do to clearly define the brand behind your site and start implementing it on your pages to create an effective and consistent experience for your website visitors.

This article is part of our “Power Up” series to help you learn new skills and take your website to the next level.

1. Purpose

To define the purpose of your your site's business or web project, it helps to start by answering the following questions:

If your site is for a business:

Why did you set up this business?

Why did you pick this industry?

What is your approach to this industry/topic?

How should companies in this industry behave internally?

How should customers of this industry be treated?

 

If your site is for a personal project:

Why did you start this project?

Why did you pick this type of project?

What is your approach to the topic of this project?

How should this type of project be run?

How should people involved with this project be treated?

 

Write down the answers to these questions on a pad of paper or type them into a document and read them a few times to immerse yourself in their content. Then you’re ready to take these answers and form them into your purpose statement. A decent purpose statement will contribute towards consistency and emotional value on your website by defining one clear goal that you should always be working towards.

A great purpose statement should be:

Clear- anyone you're working with should be able to look at the statement and understand its meaning.

Concise- express it in as few words and syllables as possible.

Inspiring- the statement should make the people who work with you proud to be involved and make them feel that they are part of a worthy cause.

 

Here's some examples from well-known brands to get your creative juices flowing:

Cisco

Bringing people together.

HP

We enable smarter ways of working and living.

AUTODESK

To create software tools that transform ideas into reality.

Accenture

Helping improve communities and the global environment.

2. Values

Values are the things that you stand for and will not compromise when operating your site. Your purpose statement defines what you will aim to achieve and your values pinpoint the characteristics you will follow to achieve this purpose. When considering work that will feature on your site in the future, be sure to refer to your values to make sure that the work communicates these values.

 

There are three main areas from which your brand values might come:

1. Your approach to your work
2. The nature of your work
3. The results of your work

 

Examples:

IBM

Dedication

Innovation

Trust

 

Shell

Honesty

Integrity

Respect

 

Rolls-Royce

Trust

Deliver

Excellence

 

There’s no golden rule for how many values your brand should have, but to avoid making things overly complicated it is best to focus on three or four. Each of them should be easily defendable with clear evidence and so central to the work you do that if you removed one of them the remaining values would not provide a full picture of your business or project.

3. Audience

The next step is to consider how the purpose and values that you have created relate to your audiences when they're using your site. To do this, create profiles that define the different groups that you intend to target as this will allow you to express your brand in ways that resonate powerfully with them.
 
Use your personal experiences and anecdotal evidence to develop these profiles and ask for the input of others to form an even more detailed picture of your audiences.
 
Start by searching online through search engines and stock photography websites for images of the different individuals you will be describing in each profile, as this will make it easier to visualise them and the details of their character.
 
Each of the profiles should contain the following:

Occupation: Small business owner

Location: London

Goals: To enlarge their team, to expand into a new office, to add more products/services to their offering

Wants: New technology for their business, more employees, better quality design

Motivations: Profit, prestige, love for their business

Aspirations: To become a leading figure in their industry, to have more time for themselves

Fears: Not receiving enough new business, not keeping up with their competitors, low levels of company growth

Problems to be solved: They want to present their company effectively through great design and don’t have the resource for an in-house designer

4. Tone of voice

Your tone of voice quite literally gives your brand a voice and is a central force in generating positive perceptions for your website visitors. However, it is easy, especially if there are several different people developing communications for you, to end up with the brand creating an inconsistent experience. To avoid this, create a tone of voice guide that everyone who works with you can refer to. 
 
There are a few different sections to a tone of voice guide that we’ll run through now.
 
Phrases to define your tone
Include a list of phrases that describe the type of tone you're looking for. This will give you a decent starting point for writing the rest of your guide and will help you to immerse yourself in your tone before you write future communications.
 
An example of these phrases could be…
 
Confident, Optimistic, Insightful, Personal, Humorous, Inspiring, Concise, Passionate.
 
Word bank
A word bank is a collection of words and phrases that have the right tone that you would like to present throughout the company’s communications. These are the words that should appear repeatedly and consistently within your copy to create a consistent on-brand writing style. For example, should you say ‘Get in touch’, ‘Contact Us’, 'Reach out', 'Give us a ring' etc.?
 
An effective way to find the concepts that your tone will be used to regularly express is to look at a sample of the current communications on your site. Pick out the words that you commonly use and check whether these are totally in line with your newly optimised brand.
 
Examples of tone of voice
Draw upon your word bank to create a few examples of your tone of voice that are totally on-brand and, to make things even clearer, include an off-brand version of these sentences with titles that explain why they don’t fit with your brand.
 
For example…
On-brand
We bring the best possible value to our clients.
Too formal
Our solutions deliver exceptional ROI.
Too informal
We’ll get you awesome results!

5. Design style

Getting the design right for your brand is an essential tool in creating positive first impressions on your site, both for potential and existing customers.

Having already translated your brand’s essence into the tone of voice you’ll be using, you should have a decent idea of the ideas you want to show in your design.

Match the following different aspects of your design to your tone of voice exactly to create a consistent brand experience for your website visitors:

Colour palette

Logo

Iconography

Typography

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