Why is website design such an important aspect of how consumers view your brand? In today’s modern, technology savvy age, the first thing a customer looks at when in the market to purchase something, is a website.

It’s imperative that you have a well designed layout and user-interface, so that the consumer has a good shopping experience and perceives your brand in a positive way. Looking at big brands that have really nice website composition and reading some tips from designers, your website will be looking nice and polished in no time!

First impressions are everything. Anywhere from dressing nicely for a first date to wearing business attire for a new job interview, everything is relevant. You want to look the same as how you want to be perceived. People think this way because our brains are firing off hundreds of questions anytime we meet someone new:

• Is this person safe to be around?
• Are you friendly?
• Will I get along with this person?
• Can I trust you?

The funny part behind this is that companies think the same way. Businesses want to ensure that they promote themselves in way that makes consumers feel comfortable and excited to purchase from them. The best way to accomplish this is through an interactive web design firm that can create a website design that adequately establishes a company’s brand identity and provides the consumer with an enjoyable experience. A website represents wholly what a company is about and what kind of services or products they have to offer. There’s a certain science to this. The idea is to keep a website polished and aesthetically pleasing to the point where the consumer is engaged enough to either purchase or come back and visit again. The question is however:

How do companies succeed in giving off this positive first impression?

Back to the Basics

Imagine this. You’re walking through a newly renovated home. New hardwood floors, fully upgraded kitchen with stainless steel appliances, brand new French doors, etc. This symbolizes: User Interface (UI). The house is near perfect except for one problem; the hallways are way too awkwardly small to walk through. This makes it troublesome for anyone who wants to navigate through the house. This symbolizes: User Experience (UX). User Interface represents the elegance of the house itself, which is clearly of high quality. However, a person living there would have a negative User Experience, due to the difficulty of traveling through it. Now take this visualization and move back to the idea of website design, it’s essentially the same concept. The definition of these terms is that User Interface (UI) is the series of screens, pages, and visual elements – like buttons and icons – that you use to interact with a device; and User Experience (UX) is the internal experience that a person has as they interact with every aspect of a company’s products and services. The User Interface (UI) aspect can consist of:

• Command language; the understanding of the software the user is interacting with.
• Menus; the structures or navigation tools used on the website.
• Graphical User Interface (GUI); layouts, interfaces, and visual elements on the page.

A company can sufficiently shape their brand identity with good use of UI and UX by including elements such as: visual imagery, motion videos, dynamic animation, creative content, and voice structure. The article goes on to say that, “…the design must translate the passion and mission of a brand in a way that resonates deeply with first-time viewers.” A key understanding of exactly what needs to go into this process can sometimes be hard without studying what exactly the target consumer is like. An interactive web design firm can specialize in doing this work for you and they even have been proven to be remarkably beneficial to any company looking for a complete design overhaul. The purpose of good web design is to encourage your audience to make a purchase. Design is simply the middle man between what a company has to offer and what a consumer wants.

Customer Behavior

It’s good to familiarize yourself with some statistics regarding the effects web design has on consumer behaviors:

• Adobe states that with only 15 minutes to consume content, 66% of consumers would prefer to view something beautifully designed vs. simple and plain.
• Adobe also reports that 38% of consumers stop engaging in content if it is unattractive in its layout or imagery.
• According to experiencedynamics.com, if content is not optimized on a website, 79% of users will search for another site to complete the task and that mobile users are five times more likely to abandon the task if the site isn’t optimized for mobile.

High end brands look at these facts and know just how necessary it is to have a better website layout and user experience design to improve the customer behavior on their site to increase time on page, create a positive brand impression, and increase conversion with sales.

Examples of Website Positive Brand Identity at Work

Apple is a very good example of how building brand identity through web design can tremendously enhance consumer experience and create otherwise absent busy opportunities. The sleekness and futuristic design of Apple’s website attracts customers and offers a unique experience only revealed to those that go through it. Some navigation fundamentals they follow(not only their website but on their apps as well) is that the content is easily viewable, the text size isn’t too big or large, the colors on the screen make everything easy to read and understand, everything is of high resolution and well organized, and the alignment is impressive. Shopping on Apple’s website offers a fairly exciting experience. There’s a full range of pictures and informative descriptions regarding each item and they almost journey you through purchasing from them.

Apple isn’t the only high end brand that uses website design to their advantage. eBay, being one of the biggest multinational e-commerce companies in the world, assists their users by having an easy to use and extensive site layout. Their front page consists of multiple featured and trending items that might stir interest for the consumer in wanting to purchase something. There is also a search bar that incorporates all different types of editable customizations, so that you as the buyer can find exactly what you are looking for. The payment process caters to consumer needs by providing different payment options, shipping specifications, and promotions. What eBay does so well, is that it combines elegance with simplicity, so that they can supply an easy shopping experience to any person of any age. Sometimes what you want your website to look like can be too hard to do in house, so make sure to check out a design firm and see what kind of brand identity services they have to offer!

Best Practices for Brand Identity Web Design

Building your brand identity through web design is not an easy task. There are a lot of factors that come to play such as color schemes, navigation, layout themes, etc. This all needs to be done while maintaining a constant set target audience and identity for your brand. Here is some valuable advice to use as support for your website development.

Blog.hubspot.com explains some quick tips when it comes to improving your web design skills:

• Design in shades of gray, then add color. Start off with a blank wireframe, then you can add color and photography.
• Use a consistent web font that’s styled accordingly to your company.
• Bury social media icons the footer of the page.
• Simplify the navigation through your website. Get rid of dropdown menus, multi-tier dropdown navigation, and reduce the number of links.
• Get rid of sidebars.
• Not every blank part of the screen needs to be filled.

The cloud-based web development platform Wix.com, also gives some insight on how to increase user experience on your website:

• Keep everything simplistic with only your most important content spotlighted. Less is more.
• Check out similar sites that you would like to emulate and make notes.
• Take advantage of visual hierarchy. Our eyes pay attention to web space in a certain pattern; make sure its in a pattern that can help you optimize important information on your site.
• Make sure colors fit well with each other, the font sizes are easy to read, and be consistent with theme.
• Make the mobile version of your site just as professional as the one on the computer.

What these guides have in common is that you need to keep it straightforward, be persistent in maintaining your theme, and make sure you’re getting your message across. Remember, brand identity is what you want your consumer to get out of scrolling through your website. Being too over the top with creativity is not a good thing and can often either shadow the image you’re trying to convey, or can make for a poor user experience. Following these tips and sticking with an overall idea of what goals you want to achieve, or even laying it out for a web design firm to handle for you, there is no reason why your website can’t be magnificently designed.

You Are Your Consumer

To successfully design a website that caters to your consumer, you need to think like one. Put yourself in the shoes of someone you think would want to buy from your company.

• Does your website suite your customer’s personality?
• Does the layout seem easy to use for someone in your brand’s target market?
• Are there interesting and intriguing images, links, buttons, etc. that will keep your consumer from leaving the page?

It’s not just about how well you can connect on a personal level. It’s very important to connect with your industry. Knowing the trends of your business’s market, plays an important role in how you understand the market in general.

Design your website in a way that will keep your customer coming back, following company updates, buying newly offered products or services because it relates to them on a personal level.

There’s a Light at the End of the Tunnel

Building a brand identity can be a rather rigorous process, but the end results are worth the pain. A consumer’s brain works like this; he or she wants to have that pleasant or memorable experience that converts to a physical product or service. As the brand offering this you need to think like the customer:

• How can I as the seller, make the journey to buy a good from my company impressive enough so that it upgrades my brand’s identity?

This should be the question that arises any time you make a website redesign or new product layout. As a brand that’s offering a service or selling a product, it’s obligatory to have a well designed website in today’s business market. As professional NFL corner-back Deion Sanders once said: “If you look good, you feel good. If you feel good, you play good. If you play good, they pay good.” If your website looks good, you can be sure that the number of sales and customers will look good too.