In online commerce, credibility is as important to a brand as it is offline. But unlike its offline big brother,
Internet is an entirely different environment made up of bits and bytes, as opposed to physical substances. It imposes a set of constraints and imperatives for effective brand-building initiatives that evolves around leveraging and tweaking building blocks of a website -- design and content.For starters, nonattendance of physical element on Internet disturbs very nature of commerce. Consumers are deprived of their ability to feel and touch products, interact with salespeople, and of course, get an instant idea whether store is credible.
Let's start with a real-life example. Say, Dave walked into a jewelry store along one of Manhattan's chic district to purchase a diamond ring. As he entered store, he surveyed its physical attributes - decoration, salesperson, products, certifications granted - to see if store had credibility and capability to fulfill his desire.
While it is relatively straightforward for jeweler (and any other brick-and-mortar business, for that matter) to instantly conjure up sense of credibility, trustworthiness, and professionalism by tweaking its physical attributes, online retailers are left to figure out how pixels beamed from an 800x600-pixel screen can be merged harmonically to reach that objective.
Design matters
What then, should be on a marketer's priority list to position his site along its branding objectives? Design. Yes, design. The first thing a visitor encounters upon logging on to a site is façade, not what's in it (read: content). Out of a number of stores, how did Dave pick which one to enter in first place? He zeroed in on one looks convincing and professional. For a moment, long-term principle that content is king has to give way for design.
As a site's design varies to a great extent as its nature of business does, there are no sets of standards for a proper design. While a conservative nuance fits image of a management consulting company, it might look dull and boring for a teen-apparel site. Colors, fonts, and graphics can be mixed together in variety of ways to come up with variety of combinations.
Yet web development has spawned a set of patterns shared by sites across diverse orientations, that address nitty-gritty of a site anatomy: design, consisting of colors, background, and images; content, which covers writing style, fonts, and company information; and usability, related to screen size and pop-up ads.
Design
Colors
Just because there are hundreds of possible color blends in your image-editing software, doesn't mean you have to use them all. In general, a site's color composition is a blend between one or two base colors and their shade variations. The golden rule here is stick to colors already dominant in industry, adding variations to convey your brand personality. Deflecting too far from convention alters your image and spawns uncertainty about your business.
Background
During early years of Web, websites were adorned with background images. Overtime, realizing it was a distraction for users, websites ditched background image and opted for solid color instead. Nowadays, background image appears rudimentary, unprofessional, and is confined to personal websites or those of unsavory businesses.
Obviously, your background color should stem from your site's central color. To maintain readability however, go with shades that are bright yet easy on eye, supposedly cream or white.
Images
Basically, images serve as an illustration and aesthetics to add more 'life' to an otherwise monotonous page. That said, unless you run an online art gallery you should use graphics sparingly, as too much of them could hamper users' browsing process and alter personality of your brand.
