When designing a website for your company it’s important to ensure that it is in keeping with your company image, brand identity, and provides brand image consistency.

Also bear in mind that no matter how well branded and designed your website is, if it’s for instance slow to load, cluttered, hard to navigate or flashy with no substance then it does no favors for your company.

Design is important, but equally so is substance and content that relates to your offering and your identity and attempts to offer it’s visitor a little bit more than just a bit of info and a contact form.

Effective Visuals
The web design should make effective use of corporate images; this includes the consistent use of your logo design/s, company colours, and company style of address. For instance if your ‘brand style’ of copywriting in your marketing literature is informal and conversational, your website should match.

The ideal method of designing a website should be to design the imagery and layout from scratch to perfectly match your brand, and to ensure the most practical layout for the content available to your visitors.

If you have a limited budget you may feel that using a template is a good solution, but doing this does not help you to differentiate your brand as being unique and in most cases becomes a stop-gap solution, meaning you end up paying for your website twice.

The majority of firms who opt for a cheap template build at some point in the future are driven to a fully custom design and layout anyway because that’s going to be the most effective website for any company that takes its online identity seriously. At some point most firms, if operating for any decent length of time, will be forced to take their identity seriously.

Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool
Marketing strategy should follow through to your website and a website could, and indeed should be a major part of your marketing mix.

If a large portion of your marketing is conducted through the distribution of company brochures for instance, there is no reason why these cannot be ordered through your website, or indeed in today’s age, customers are more than used to downloading a PDF brochure online.

One major plus being that a PDF is virtually free for you to distribute by comparison to a printed brochure, and friendlier to the environment to boot.

But don’t stop there, the Internet offers the business owner a huge range of possibilities when it comes to their website … use the Internet to offer your customers real interaction with your brand and what it stands for; blogs, podcasts, forums, live online support, networks and more.

Get involved with all the marketing tools that web 2.0 offers a business.

Here are just a few things that your website could be offering your customers:
- Products (shopping)
- Support forums
- Podcasting
- Blogs
- Downloadable guides and brochures
- Tools and resources (such as calculators depending on your industry)
- Video

All of this and more should be updated week in, week out if you want Google to like you, but that’s a whole other blog!