Marion Barnham • February 14, 2025
Websites are integral to the way businesses work. They aim to showcase what a business is capable of, their services, case studies of past clients, contact details, and even resources on their industry to help educate their audience. They boosted the global economy in the late 90s and have allowed companies to exchange goods and services ever since by playing a vital role in giving equal opportunities to access information to anyone at any time.
But let’s start with the basics. What is a website? How can one define it?
A web-site is as its name indicates part of the world wide web and the internet. A site of a specific topic or business has numerous other pages that fall under the same domain name. The first one you see when you initially visit a website is the homepage.
The first-ever website was published on August 6, 1991. This very important day in today’s history was not only the debut of websites but also the first day that the web was a publicly available service on the Internet. Its creator is Berners-Lee and the topic of the website was how to use the world wide web and what the www project included.
Today websites are very potent tools that aim to drive traffic and leads to your business. This is way easier said than done. You need to have a strategic plan in place to effectively do that. You not only need to make it well-structured and easy to navigate but you should not also forget that it needs to represent your identity and values as a company.
To begin with, we are going to define the basic structure must-haves of a company’s website:
- Homepage
- About Page
- Services/Products Page
- FAQ page
- Testimonials/Case Studies
- Blog/News Page
- Contact Page
- Privacy Policy Page
- Careers
Even though these steps are pretty much the same for everyone, you can find big differences among companies of the same industry and that is mainly because they ultimately have a different mission, values, and goals and of course brand book. Branding is an interdependent part of a website’s look and feel.
It is not only who your brand is and what it does better than others but what your audience’s perception of your business is. Branding is mainly divided into two sections, written content, and design. So you will probably need a good copywriter and a good graphic designer to achieve a successful website transformation or creation.
Let’s now talk about the importance of the brand book and what it includes. The best time to build your brand book to maximise your ROI and results is when you are building your marketing strategy. It covers all the rules and instructions that you need to follow across all marketing collateral. More specifically what needs to be part of the brand book is:
- Logo
- Logomark
- Logo misuse
- Color palette
- Typeface
- Typography
- Mission
- Iconography
- Tone of voice
- Imagery/Photography
It might look like a lot of effort but this will save you a lot of time later. Once you have everything ready, you could use the same materials for your business for many years unless you decide to do a major re-branding to launch a new service or product (for example Facebook platform, Google tools etc)
Unfortunately, many SMBs fail to follow these steps. In a recent Barnham survey, after questioning 55 SMBs from different countries and in different industries, we found that ONLY 38% believe that their website clearly communicates how they solve their target customer’s pain points. Other interesting statistics reveal that:
- The website is easy to navigate.
- YES 77% NO 23%
- The content is about prospects and clients and
- their needs.
- YES 50% NO 50%
- The content effectively incorporates keywords.
- YES 41% NO 59%
- There are several calls to action on the website.
- YES 60% NO 40%
- There are information and actions for people at
- each level of the sales cycle.
- YES 9% NO 91%
It looks like most businesses make an effort to make it functional and stop there. If you find that you face similar problems with your company’s website, Barnham Marketing can help your business grow with an effective website branding strategy. Start today with a Free Marketing Audit.