Branding: Extending your personal brand into your website

When creating a business website, there are several things you can do to make the website feel like an extension of your company. If done correctly, your website should feel like an advertisement for your brand.

Using your logo

For this blog we’re assuming you already have a logo (if not that’s an entirely separate conversation). Do you have a brand guide? If so, there are probably specifications within that guide to let you know how your logo should and should not be displayed. If not, here are some basics:

• Sizing - what is the native size of your logo? Do you have a vector or is it a fixed size? Take some time to figure out how small you can make it without looking bad or losing readability, this will be especially important when developing your mobile site.

• Transparency - make sure you’re using a transparent file type, nobody wants to see a logo sitting in a white box on top of a gray background. Which brings up one more point:

• File Type - the most popular file type for a logo is a PNG as it supports transparency while retaining image quality. SVG’s are a great option as well. Avoid using JPEG as it is a non-transparent file type.

Using your colors

Chances are you already have a color scheme for your business which may be reflected in your logo. How you integrate these colors into your website depends on what your company’s colors are, but here are some tips:

• Use the darkest color for your text. If your logo/color scheme doesn’t include a dark color, then use black or something close to it.

• Use your most eye catching color for your “Call to Action” buttons, or other areas that need a pop of color or that you want to draw attention to. Reds, blues, greens, whatever your brightest and most eye catching color is.

• If your color scheme includes a light or muted color this may be a good choice for a background color for areas that need to be separated from other content.

Using your font

Another good way to extend your brand into your website is by utilizing your company’s chosen font:

• The first thing you need to do is make sure you are allowed to use your font online. For certain fonts you can only use them with the right license, so check to see if your font is copyrighted and if so, what type of license you have to use it.

• Ideally your company is using a web font, such as one found on Google fonts. If so then including your font will be as easy as adding a single line of code to your markup.

• In the even that your font is not web based, but you do have a liscense to use it online, then you’ll likely need to use an online web font converter tool - such as the one found on Font Squirrel - to create .woff files which you can upload and call by way of the @font-face rule in your CSS.

Need some help with all of this? The PSPinc design team would love to help you create a stunning business website which showcases your brand.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. 1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

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Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.