Have you heard how important website branding is but aren’t exactly sure what it is, and you’re even less sure how to create a brand for your site? Maybe you’re wondering if it’s even possible for someone with minimal marketing experience to create a brand for a website.
If so, you’ve come to the right place.
What branding is, why it’s important, and how to create a site brand are just some of the topics covered in this post. By the time you’ve finished reading, you’ll have a good understanding of branding a website, including formulating your brand voice, working with tones, creating a color palette, and more. You’ll also get practical advice on applying your brand to your WordPress website.
So whether you’re new to website branding or need a refresher, this guide will get you up to speed.
What Do We Mean When We Say Branding?
Branding is much more than just a logo. It’s a set of standards that run right through your site, products, services, and entire presence on and offline. Branding can cover colors, fonts, voice, and more, making it much more than just a logo.
But branding is even more than just the fonts, colors, and logo you choose. Your branding is a promise you make to your audience.
A brand identity lets the customer or reader know what to expect when they land on your website. Your brand can be shorthand for your values. If you get it right, just a glimpse of your branding will instantly convey all the good things about your product, service, or ethos to your audience.
Think of your favorite brands or the most well-known ones. When you see the color scheme, font, or logo they use, you immediately think of what that brand means to you and then transfer those feelings to the experience or object carrying that branding. Depending on the brand, this could be value, trustworthiness, fun, quality, or anything at all. This is the brand promise. It’s what the brand implies and means to those familiar with it.
Why Does Your Website Need Strong Branding?
Whether your website is a commercial endeavor or something you’re doing for fun, it should have a brand. In fact, even if you don’t create a brand or implement a brand identity, your site will still be conveying a brand to your audience – it just won’t be one you’ve intentionally created.
For example, if your site uses colors and fonts inconsistently, this will signal to visitors that your website and its content are inconsistent. If colors clash and fonts don’t work well together, it could be signifying that your ideas and products aren’t well thought out or in alignment.
With this in mind, it’s well worth consciously crafting a brand. Doing so will let you control the image you portray to your audience rather than leaving it up to chance. Your website is constantly communicating a message to your audience. Creating a brand lets you control this message.
Another benefit of strong branding is that it will help you stand out from your competitors. Well-thought-out branding allows you to separate yourself from others in your space. Before your visitors have digested your content, used your products, or experienced your services, they’ll see your branding. This means you can use your branding to communicate your values and personality to your audience immediately and before any interactions or transactions have taken place.
A strong brand will make you and your website memorable. It will also help you to control the impression that your audience forms when they arrive at your site.
Planning Your Website Branding Process
Now that we know what branding is and why it’s so important, it’s time to find out how you can create a brand for your site.
After that, you’ll learn about branding a website with your chosen logo and colors. We’ll also cover how to apply your voice to the key parts of your site.
Establishing a Basic Brand Voice and Identity
Establishing a brand voice is an essential part of creating a brand for your site. The brand voice can be thought of as the personality of your brand. This voice or personality is delivered in all the different ways you communicate with your audience, including via blog posts, social media content, and videos. No matter what you’re communicating, your brand voice is always the same.
However, you can use tones to modify your voice for different scenarios.
For example, you might want to use one tone while announcing an exciting new product or service in a blog post and another more serious tone when sharing a formal contract or support emails with a client. In each scenario, your voice will convey your brand’s personality, but your tone will be appropriate for the message you’re delivering.
You can try this simple “We are X, not Y” exercise to establish your brand voice:
Think about who you are and who you’re not to help you find your brand voice. For example, we are fun but not silly; we are helpful but not condescending; we are weird but not offensive. You can also list the handful of adjectives that best describe your brand, such as professional, reliable, and trustworthy. Or alternatively, fun, outgoing, and supportive. Your brand voice can be a mixture of who you are and how you want to be thought of.
Once you’ve determined your personality, who you are, and who you aren’t, you’ll have established basic brand voice guidelines to be used in all communication. You can then use tones to modify that voice as appropriate.
Writing Basic Brand Copy Elements
When creating your branding, two elements that you should add to your website are your tagline and mission statement.
Your tagline copy should be one short sentence that summarizes the promise you make to your visitors, clients, or customers.
For example, on the WordPress.com website, it says, “Build anything with WordPress.com
Whatever you’re building, there’s a fast, intuitive way to get started.”
This statement makes it immediately clear what you can do at WordPress.com.
For the mission statement copy, compose a short statement that summarizes why you’re in business or running your site.
Choosing Your Site’s Color Scheme
As mentioned, your site’s color scheme is a key part of your branding. Finding the right colors for your brand is important, but it can be tricky. Thankfully there are some tools to help you.
First up is the color wheel and color theory.
The color wheel is a circular diagram that shows the relationship between colors, while color theory explains how colors interact with each other. When used together, they can help you create a color scheme that’s right for your branding and website.
Colors opposite each other on the color wheel, such as yellow and blue or red and cyan, complement each other. They also create the greatest contrast and most visual interest when used together. Alternatively, choose colors next to each other on the wheel, such as red and yellow or magenta and blue, for a more balanced look.
You can use whichever colors you like, but knowing how those colors work together and how they’ll be interpreted should help you choose the right ones for your brand. Your website color scheme can be used to tell your audience many things, so be sure to think carefully about the colors you choose.
Another tool you can use to find suitable colors for your brand is the Canva Color Palette Generator. This tool lets you generate a palette by uploading an image, choosing from a selection of pre-defined options, or picking your own colors.
Once you have your brand colors, you’ll need to find their HEX codes. Doing so lets you use those colors consistently across all your properties, such as your website, logo, and email marketing messages, without having to try and attempt the almost impossible task of finding them out on a color picker.
The free Canva Color wheel tool or the seven-day free Pantone Connect trial will let you do this. The HEX codes consist of a hash symbol followed by six digits. The Pantone matching system can help with this, too.
Once you’ve found the HEX codes for your colors, make a note of them. You’ll need them when applying your branding to your site and other assets.
Getting a Logo Made
Logos are another key part of any brand identity.
While you can create a logo yourself from scratch, you might want to get one made. If that sounds appealing, the Logo Maker Service is worth checking out. It’s a custom partnership between WordPress.com and Fiverr that lets you generate a professional-looking logo in just a few clicks. You can then browse multiple logo designs — all of which can be easily customized — before deciding whether to make an affordable purchase.
Alternatively, you can hire a designer to produce a logo. Reaching out to freelancers with portfolios you admire is one way to find a logo designer. Posting a job ad on a site like Upwork is another.
Implementing Your Brand on Your WordPress Site
Now that you’ve created your branding, it’s time to look at implementing it on your WordPress site.
If you don’t already have a site, our guide to building a website from scratch with WordPress.com will get you there in just 10 steps.
Writing Essential Site Content and Copy
Let’s start with the written site copy.
All site content and copy should be well-written and adhere to your brand voice.
However, the tagline and About page deserve particular attention. As the tagline is usually displayed on the homepage of your site, it needs to resonate with your target audience immediately. When visitors want to know more about you, your site, or your company, they’ll head to the About page.
Due to this, you’ll need to ensure these two elements are a good representation of your brand.
Crafting a Tagline
Starting with your WordPress site tagline, you can edit it in WordPress by clicking on the Settings → General sidebar menu item to navigate to the General Settings page.
You can then enter your site’s title and tagline. Where these are displayed will depend on your choice of theme. However, in most cases, they’ll be prominently displayed on your homepage and elsewhere on your site.
If your site title and tagline aren’t being displayed where you’d like them to, this guide explains how to add them using the Site Tagline block.
Alternatively, you can incorporate a tagline into the design of your homepage rather than using the tagline block. This gives you more opportunity to communicate your message due to the extra characters available.
Using the Heading block is a good option if you’re taking this approach. Adding it to a page lets you insert text and then format it in an eye-catching way.
But how do you come up with a good tagline for your site?
A tagline should be concise and punchy. Not only will this grab the attention of your visitors and quickly convey the focus of your site, but it will also ensure it’s easy to read and nicely presented.
When crafting your tagline, think about who you are, what you do, and who your target audience is. Consider the benefits of spending time on your site. While you won’t be able to cover all of these in a single tagline, these prompts will give you some ideas.
If you take a look at the WordPress.com homepage, you’ll see that the tagline quickly tells visitors where they are (the site of the world’s most popular website builder). It also lets the visitor know what they can do at the site (Join the millions of people that call WordPress.com home).
When coming up with a tagline, ask yourself what you do and for whom, or what you offer and how that benefits people. Remember to keep your brand voice in mind and use an appropriate tone.
Creating the About Us Page Copy
After you’ve created a tagline, you should focus on the copy for your About Us page. This page gives you a great opportunity to share your brand’s story with your audience, so don’t overlook it.
When creating the About Us page copy, think about why you created the site, who you made it for, and how you help your target audience.
Feel free to talk about yourself or the founders of your brand. Adding a hint of sales content to your About Us page is also fine, so don’t be afraid to talk up your products or services. You can even finish with a call-to-action that inspires the reader to check out your products and services or another important part of your site.
Once you’ve created the copy for this page, you can find out how to build an About page with WordPress here.
Be sure to weave your brand voice throughout your site. Refer to your voice description as much as you need to ensure you follow it. Remember to use tones to suit the type of content you’re writing, such as a friendly tone for your first blog post and a more serious one for your terms and conditions page.
Customize Your Site’s Colors with the WordPress Site Editor
When setting your site’s color scheme, you can do this in WordPress from the Site Editor, provided you’re using a theme that supports it.
You can access the Site Editor by clicking on the Appearance → Editor sidebar menu item once you’ve logged into WP Admin.
Next, click on the Styles icon in the right sidebar. Then click on Colors.
You can now use the HEX codes for the color palette you generated earlier to apply those colors to your site’s branding.
If you’re using a classic theme – rather than a site editing enabled one — you can find out how to update your colors in this guide to changing colors in the customizer. If you’re not sure which type of theme you’re using and which editors you have access to, this guide to the WordPress Site Editor, Template Editor, and Page Editor explains it all.
Add Your Site’s Logo
With your logo file in hand, navigate to the General Settings page of WP Admin (Settings → General on the sidebar menu).
From there, click on the Change button under the Site icon section.
Then you can click on the Add new button to upload the file from your computer or select a file you’ve already uploaded to your WordPress Media Library.
Once you’ve uploaded the file, hit the Save settings button to apply the new logo to your site.
You can also get more control over how and where your logo is displayed, such as in a custom header design or other parts of your site. You can find out more about this on the Site Logo block page.
Conclusion
As you can see, branding is very important, whether it’s for your site or any other presence you have.
Branding gives you a convenient way to connect with your audience, create a memorable impression, and convey your values and identity.
While creating a brand isn’t necessarily easy, thanks to the exercises and tools covered in this post, it’s something that’s very much achievable.
Establishing a brand voice and understanding tones, choosing a color palette, and getting a logo, will make visits to your site a much more trustworthy, memorable, and relatable experience.
If you don’t intentionally develop a brand, your site will still be making an impression on your visitors; it just won’t be one you’ve chosen and might not convey the message you want.
For anyone who doesn’t have their own site yet, our guide to building a website from scratch with WordPress.com will get you up and running in no time.
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