8 Critical Components of a Website

Having a website that is functional and in line with your brand is critical. In this blog, you’ll learn about eight qualities a website should possess to ensure you are maximizing it as a marketing tool.

Design

You shouldn’t take the appearance of your website lightly. Using your brand guide is critical. Don’t have a brand guide? You NEED one! Consistency in the appearance of your website matters a lot. Ensure that your website maintains consistency throughout, from webpage to webpage, the navigation, the fonts, margins, spacing, color, heading sizes, button styles, etc. As readers go through your web pages, they should feel like they’re in a peculiar space that has a single identity that captures your brand. Your website should not lack coherence. As they go from page to page on your site, the unique identity of your site should still be glaring. This means that you shouldn’t use design elements that look out of place with the rest.

Responsiveness

How responsive is your website? Being able to answer this question correctly is one of the qualities a good website should possess. You are building for your users, and your users do not all use a single device.

Building a website that is responsive across devices is crucial to creating a fantastic user experience. A responsive website will function well on both old and new desktop devices, and on different types of mobile devices as well, be it smartphones or tablets. So, when creating your website, your web designer has to ensure that your site is built with themes that can function well on all devices. In case you didn’t know, Google is now mobile-first, and that means that Google considers how mobile-friendly your site is when calculating the ranking of your site.

Content

Apart from a good design and responsive website, content is equally important. Your design won’t be of much value if you are not sending a clear message to your users. Capturing readers’ interests with good website content can be really challenging. Most visitors will spend just a few seconds on a web page before deciding what to do next.

Good website writing is the key to beating these odds. Well-written content that’s optimized for the web rises to the top of search results and holds readers’ attention. The content must also be consistent with your brand’s personality.

Load Time

Your website loading time is another factor to watch out for. The average load time of your website is one of the qualities that make an excellent website. Optimize your website to ensure it doesn’t take too long to load.

When you have a website that loads fast, you will simultaneously reduce your site’s bounce rate. Website loading time is the speed at which your website loads when a visitor tries to access a webpage on the site. Bounce rate, on the other hand, is how frequent and how quick visitors leave your website when they visit. If your site’s visitors are impressed with what they find on your website, they will spend more time on it, but if they are not impressed, they will leave almost immediately.

Contact Form

Tracking user activity and conversion and collecting user data is a good practice that can be used to improve your website and your business at large. Using a contact form makes it easier for your visitors to enter their details without leaving your website. Your contact form should always be accompanied by a thank you message.

Call To Action (CTA)

A quality website needs to have a call-to-action feature(s), as this can help increase your conversion rate by a large margin. The call-to-action feature can be used to build a mailing list, give out coupon prices or make an actual sale. Call to action is a key marketing strategy; hence you need to have it as part of your website, and you must implement it strategically to get the best results.

Your call to action (CTA) isn’t just a text asking your target audience to make a commitment, it is a pitch, so polish it and make it look appealing and convincing.

Security

The security level of your website is paramount to the users. A good website must ensure proper security measures are in place to shield it from hackers. If your website is insecure, do not expect users to keep their information with you, nor will they trust you enough to make use of your website.

The first thing to do if you want a secure website is to host your website on a web hosting provider that offers strong security. Your website should also have SSL encryption.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is a crucial part of a quality website, so ensure your website follows SEO rules and guidelines. A website with a poor code structure won’t fare well when it comes to SEO, which reduces the ability to attract traffic from external sources and search engines correctly.

There are several SEO practices you can do to make your site rank well on search engines — good use of keywords, internal and external link building, optimizing your title tags, optimizing your images, etc.

Hyve Marketing is a full-service marketing partner, that offers a concierge approach to tailor solutions to meet your needs. We can manage all aspects of your marketing needs: branding and design, website development, digital marketing, social media management, paid search, content management, photography, and video production. Contact us today for complimentary marketing analysis of your existing brand and collateral.

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The Power of a Brand

When we develop a new brand or rebrand a company, we often find clients think they’re just getting a logo. A mark to stamp anywhere and everywhere – front and center on the back of the business card, thrown in the corner of a letterhead, etc. Of course, the logo is the centerpiece of any branding project and creates the visual of the company’s identity, however when done right, there’s so much more that is involved.

What Is A Brand?

A brand speaks through visual language, writes in a consistent voice, takes on a perspective, and evokes a specific feeling. There are many elements such as color, typography, and imagery style that, once defined, create the outline for the brand and anything that can be done within those boundaries is how the identity grows. A company’s brand not only states WHO they are and WHAT they do, but HOW they do it. The last element, the HOW is what so many company’s fail to relay through their brand.

A brand should include the following elements:

  1. Defined color palette
  2. Typography
  3. Imagery style
  4. Consistent icon/logo family
  5. Logo in color, black, and white
  6. Positioning Statement
  7. Brand Guide

What Makes a Good Brand?

A good brand draws inspiration from and reflects its owners and their values. A designer will listen to their client, and based on personal experience or research, will come up with several directions to take a brand.  But a great designer balances 1.) best-practice design and communication principles, 2.) current trends in the market, and 3.) the themes and messaging that inspired the client in the first place. A great brand rests comfortably, and seemingly effortlessly, on these 3 legs. But of course, getting to this point is the farthest thing from effortless and is done with deliberate intent.

A good brand offers a cohesive design system. Of course, you can simply throw your logo everywhere on everything, and probably for a lot less money, however, the result of that would be cheapening the logo (and by extension your brand) by significantly reducing the amount of impact it has on the consumer. A logo is your chorus and every instance that you use it should be thoughtful and intentional. It is the culmination of all the big ideas that went into your brand, the climax, and just like a song your brand needs verses. A good brand utilizes all its core elements (color, typography, etc.) to evoke emotion and communicate its mission, stance in the marketplace, and goals. To do this, you must create a design system that cohesively presents the brand in different, visually interesting ways, from many angles. The elements and graphics created within this system should push and challenge the boundaries of the brand without breaking them.

A good brand is well defined and maintained for consistency. A brand can ebb and flow and even ultimately change over time. However, it is of the utmost importance that the core pillars, themes, and messaging that went into creating the brand in the first place are maintained. Every decision should be made with deliberate intention.

A good brand is easily executable to any/all relevant mediums. If your logo is only going to live online (maybe it is a subset of a larger company and only needs a space off of the main website) many options are available. If the logo is going to be sewn or embroidered on fabric or used on small swag items…. then you need something simple. If the logo is going to be screen printed, then having a design that accommodates colors and/or limitations specific to screen printing is critical. These are just a few examples, and when Hyve’s Leadership Team is managing a brand we take into account all these considerations.

The Impact of a Powerful Brand

A powerful brand can propel your business into the world and command attention, it can situate you in the marketplace alongside good company or differentiate you from a sea of the same, and it can roll with the punches or scale easily with growth while withstanding the test of time. A brand that consistently and clearly communicates its messaging, purpose, and personality can garner true, unwavering loyalty. A new brand that positions itself well in relation to its competition while effectively solving an existing pain point or problem can take over an industry.

At the end of the day the question that we find to be most important, and the question that should be asked at every turn is “What am I trying to communicate?”. Whether you are creating a brand from scratch, pivoting your existing brand, or just developing your brand and its strategies further, come back to this question every time you need to make a decision. Ensure that the intent of communication aligns with the brand’s core principles, and message and execute accordingly and creatively within the brand’s visual language and tone of voice.

Hyve Marketing is a true, full-service marketing partner, we can manage all aspects of your marketing needs: branding and design, website development, digital marketing, social media management, paid search, content management, photography, and video production. Contact us today for complimentary marketing analysis of your existing brand and collateral.

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