5 Tips for Web Design & Branding for Startups and Entrepreneurs

The age of startups is on the rise, with many businesses, from the individual entrepreneur to established corporations, moving on from traditional print and online media. Today, a business can write its own ticket and develop anything from a new breakthrough software program to an eco-friendly packaging design for any product.

Even if you’re a startup or an entrepreneur, your website is your online presence and a reflection of your brand. It’s the first thing people will see when they visit your site.

1. Define your business strategy and identify your target audience.

You need to know what you want from your website so that you can create the right content for it. Do you want to sell products, provide information or advertise? The answer will determine the type of content you need and how to present it.

In order to target your ideal customer, you should first understand who they are and what they want from your product or service. Use this information to create a buyer persona – a fictional person based on real data about prospects that you can use when creating content for your site.

2. Make sure all the elements of your visual identity work together.

The whole design concept should be coherent and consistent, from fonts used on headings to the colour scheme selected for different pages of the site (or even different parts of one page). It’s important that every element works well together so that visitors don’t feel uncomfortable when surfing through the pages of your site or confused about where they are in relation to other parts of it – which can happen easily if you have too many different styles going on at once.

3. Know your competition.

It’s important to know what other businesses in your industry are doing when it comes to their website design, so that you can keep up with them and make sure yours is just as good as theirs. If there’s one thing that people love about websites today, it’s beautiful imagery. If you want visitors to stay on yours for longer than five seconds, then make sure that it looks good enough for them to spend some time looking around at all of its different elements.

4. Make sure the visuals are consistent and relevant to your brand.

This is especially important if you’re using stock images on your site or blog posts – make sure they match your brand identity as closely as possible so that visitors know exactly where they are if they see an image again later on in their browsing session. Make sure the colours used match too, as these can subconsciously influence people’s opinions of a company or product (such as red = danger; pink = feminine etc). If you’re not sure how to do this properly, get some help from a graphics designer or marketing consultant who knows what they’re talking about – it’ll pay off!

5. Think ahead of time about how you want to use your brand.

Visitors to your site will form an opinion about it instantly. In fact, it only takes 0.05 seconds for them to form an initial impression of your website, according to survey by Magicdust.

The most important element in creating a good first impression is planning ahead. The way your website looks and functions is a reflection of your company and its products and services. If you don’t plan ahead, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of building a website and neglect some of the most important elements, like making sure that the design and function are intuitive for visitors.

These are tips for ensuring that you have an effective web presence and branding.

In the end, whether you are a small business or a large corporation, you want to ensure that your brand is presented in the best possible way. With these suggestions, we hope to help provide you with a standard against which your branding can be evaluated.