15 questions to ask before you launch your website

While you may think that your brand is clear to web visitors as long as your company logo and a familiar tagline are displayed prominently on your website, in truth, much more is required to impress upon your customers your complete branding message.

To be effective, your brand must evoke an emotional response in your audience. How well does your website exemplify your brand?

Visual Cues

Your website should employ visual cues to enhance your brand image. Your logo is just one of these. Other cues include your color palette, font usage, and a distinctive layout.

Each of these visual cues helps build an emotional connection with your audience while sending off a certain impression about your brand.

Visual cues should also match the products or services you offer. For instance, a site that sells luxury cars would reasonably include a more elegant design than would a website for the sale of monster trucks.

Ask the following questions to assess your brand’s visual impact:

1. Does our logo evoke an emotional response?
2. Does our website’s color scheme project the energy of our brand?
3. Are our fonts and layout choices consistent with that energy, while being welcoming and accessible to website visitors?
4. Are the layouts, color palette, and fonts complementary to the products or services we offer?
5. Does each visual element reflect our company’s overall brand message?

The User Experience

A user’s experience on the website speaks subliminally about how easy you will make it to do business with them—purchasing goods and services, answering questions and providing support, and engaging them.

To reflect your brand’s commitment to customer convenience and superior customer service, your website design must be intuitive. You must visualize and respond to the motivations and actions of your average customer. Then, you must organize the layout and sitemap in such a way that the average customer can easily navigate to areas of interest.

Ask the following questions to assess your website user’s experience:

1. Does the average visitor see easily how to navigate throughout the most important areas of the website?
2. Does everything on our site load correctly and at an appropriate speed?
3. Does our website provide cues about where additional relevant content can be found?
4. Is the feel of every page harmonious, or are there areas that would appear to the average customer as a virtual no-man’s land?
5. Is there a logical organization of content and transition between pages, reflecting an understanding of our customer’s interests and needs?

Content

You must ensure that the overall tone and voice of your website is harmonious throughout. Whether it be blog posts or general page content, the website’s content must genuinely reflect the overall brand.

For instance, a corporate law firm would use dramatically different imagery and written tone as compared with a brew pub. Your brand should use content to showcase your brand’s personality.

Ask the following questions to assess your website’s content:

1. What is distinctive about the personality of my brand? Humor? Ingenuity? Conscientiousness? Professionalism?
2. How can we set the tone from a verbal / content standpoint to ensure potential customers understand who we are?
3. How can we use our personality to distinguish ourselves in our industry?
4. Are we using content to stimulate our audience to act / react either by reaching out to us or by taking some other action?

The Final Question

Never lose sight of who you are, why you’re doing what you do in your unique way, and how you exemplify it every day as you conduct business and communicate with your customers. Your brand and your website should reflect this.

Ask yourself this one final question…

1. Does your website project your brand message in a way that enables your customer to make an informed, confident decision about purchasing / connecting with your business?

If not, then it may be time for a change.