How to Design Your Website during a Rebranding
It’s time to rebrand. From the visual elements such as logo and brand colors to the core of your business – vision, and mission – rebranding includes many activities and alterations to your company’s identity.
Your website is vital to the success of your rebranding effort. Your site’s design, the company’s brand identity, social media presence, and all other brand elements must be in sync. Consistency in marketing, messaging, and brand identity leads your customers to remember your business and, hopefully, return.
This article will be helpful to anyone whose business is about to embark on the rebranding process.
Determine your rebranding goal(s)
Your company’s rebranding and website redesigning efforts should continually work towards achieving your set business goals.
Before you hire a team of designers and marketers, ask yourself what your company’s intended outcomes are with this rebrand. It’s best to have this information well in hand before approaching a designer.
For instance:
- Do you want to freshen up your website and branding?
- Are you rehauling products/services you offer and want the brand identity to reflect that?
- Do you have a new target audience to cater to or a tweaked brand mission/vision?
- Are there any existing sites that might be used for inspiration?
- Do you have brand guidelines already in place?
Once you’ve defined the goals, consider how the change would reflect on your customer traffic, client satisfaction, and business profits.
Last but not least, define how you’ll measure the success of your brand rehaul.
Evaluate your current brand presence
Now that you’ve set the goal, it’s time to identify why your present brand identity didn’t contribute to achieving it. This is essentially a gap analysis – finding the gap between what you have now and what you want to have in the future.
To start, collect and analyze data from your website analytics (data) and interview customers and team members (people) on their opinion of your business brand. Also, ask what they candidly think of the brands of competitors. This step is crucial in determining where you stand and which path to take.
Your site’s analytics hold invaluable insights to leverage. For example, you can see the pages on which users spend the most time, from which pages they quickly bounce off, and which pages convert prospective leads the most. If there are pages with a high bounce rate (people leave too quickly) note that to your designers.
Data is insignificant until it becomes information. So, take your time to dissect what the user behavior on your website tells you, and define your current site’s strong and weak points.
Conducting customer and employee interviews is an equally useful data source. Strive to ask open-ended questions, encourage site users to share their experience with your brand and website, and be keen to learn more about their perception of your competitors.
Consider brand elements translation
Complex, elaborate, highly-detailed logos are not helpful. This is because the intricacies of such logos are difficult to translate into other brand aspects.
For example, logos are small on a website. Smaller on a business card. Even smaller on a pen. On such a tiny surface, logo details will get lost – if it’s even possible to replicate them on such a minuscule space.
Before making any decisions, assess how each branding aspect would translate to your website and other brand collateral.
Think about how the color scheme would work on the website, how memorable the logo would be to your target audience, and whether fonts fit your brand industry.
For example, bank website design should be professional and minimal, and evoke trust among clients. There is a reason many big companies choose the color blue – it engenders trust and confidence.
Prepare a brand style guide
Ensure a seamless digital translation of your rebranding by preparing an in-depth style guide.
The style guide should be identical to your general brand guidelines, specifying detail on how to translate the looks and elements of your new brand to the website. In addition, your style guide should outline the non-negotiables, such as the right color scheme, acceptable logo variations, font choices, etc.
Developing a style guide is vital for creating and maintaining a consistent brand identity.
While in the redesigning phase, your designers will reference the style guide for site colors. The developers will require the style guide when coding your web page templates.
Your brand style guide will be handy even long after the website is redesigned. For example, social media marketers will use your style guide for crafting their social posts.
As this document will be used across the board by professional designers who developed your brand and new employees who know little about your brand guidelines, it’s best you entrust your style guide-making process to someone qualified to properly build your new website and streamline your rebranding and redesigning efforts.
Hold on to what was good
Rebranding and redesigning don’t necessarily equal starting with a clean slate. After all, you’ve built some valuable assets over the years that help your customers recognize you, find you online, and decide to return to put trust in your brand.
Certain design elements, web pages, messaging, and general brand concepts should be retained in your new rebrand and site redesign. Doing a 180 on your brand story and appearance would do more harm than good, not to mention that’s not often the point of rebranding and redesigning.
As mentioned earlier, one of the critical steps in the redesign/rebrand process is evaluating your brand’s present state. So, ensure to retain everything that has shown positive results in your evaluation.
Perhaps it’s a well-written blog piece, a contact form CTA, or neatly crafted unique proposition value: make sure you safeguard these assets during your rebrand.
The same goes for your brand elements as well. If your colors make you recognizable among the target audience or your brand’s vision and mission remain unaltered, there is no reason to tweak them solely for the purpose of refreshing your identity.
Wrap up with a blast launch
Once your website redesign and company rebranding are all done, it’s time to effectively market them and prepare your employees, customers, stakeholders, business partners, and the general public for your brand’s new vibe.
Ensure that all the changes are consistent across all channels and customer touchpoints, such as your website, social media profiles, newsletters, brand collaterals, etc.
Consistency helps you create a cohesive, well-planned, and put-together brand that customers and investors can trust. Thus, rebranding and redesign go hand-in-hand, and successfully translating your brand identity into your company’s digital presence is key to a successful rebranding effort.
Tags: Personal Branding.
