The Recruiters Mini Guide To: Your Website Planner & Workbook For 2023 - Part 1
The Brand Growth Hub is now live with all our resources in one place!
https://www.boldidentities.com/brand-growth
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01 VISUAL DISCOVERY
A lot of companies have a brand toolkit. this helps everyone convey your visual and verbal brand guidelines for anyone that picks it up. after all consistency is everything.
Those that don’t will need to undertake research to gather inspiration for all things visual. this research will set the foundations of your brand aesthetic and will help steer your trusted web/design professional in your way of thinking. Favourite this newsletter URL in your browser and make notes as you go through each section.
We’ve also attached some examples in the original guide from some brand toolkits (it would make this newsletter far too long with them included) we’ve recently done so check out you can see what yours might look like by finding this guide on The Brand Growth Hub - link at the top and bottom of this article.
(If you have a brand toolkit you may as well skip this bit!)
Before we go through the different elements of the visual discovery here are a few tips to bear in mind that you might want to come back to as you work through each point:
BRAINSTORM VISUALS – Use words that best describe your brand and then look at how they can be made tangible.
THINK EMOTIONALLY – How can you resonate with your audience? What feelings do you want to evoke? Look into ‘Plutchik’s Wheel Of Emotions’ to see what colours are affiliated with which emotions, and 'Carl Jung's Personality Archetypes' to help identify the characteristics of your business. Reflect your characteristics – how do you want these to be portrayed through visuals?
USE VISUAL PLATFORMS FOR RESEARCH - Pinterest & Instagram is the home to tons of visual creators! Use hashtags to find the subject matter you're looking for.
The more information you can provide on all these points, the better your web/design agency can align with your desires.
? Colour Palettes - Choose the colours you like for your brand. Jot down the hex codes of some colours you like.
? Logo - Pull a range of different types of logos you like off the web and state what it is you like about each one or why it aligns with your ideal brand identity if you want to go that one step further.
? Brand & Design Inspo - What style do you feel most suited to? Vintage, luxury, natural/rustic, international, tech, feminine, colourful & bright etc. Visual style cards can really help this exercise. Search ‘visual style cards’ or ‘visual style guides’ to get you started if you don’t have any ideas off the bat.
? Shapes & Icons - Shapes and icons help support your brand identity. Search ‘brand shapes’ as a starting point to look at some great examples used by leading companies or ‘geometric shapes’ or ‘abstract shapes’ for a bottomless pit of inspiration.
? Website/Image Style - What style do you envisage your site having an emphasis on? Block colour, bold colour, bold typography, dynamic, gradients, minimal, overlay, widescreen unique landing pages etc. Look at some of your favourite websites!
? Fonts - Do you have a specific font or font family you use or love? If not browse google fonts or skip this stage. Agencies can typically plug this gap when everything else is done to find a font that best suits your brand.
? Brand Assets - Jot down or upload any further brand assets you would like featured on your website such as videos, overlays, images from your social media etc.
? Image Application - Image application is how an image is applied. They are a crucial element of brand toolkits. They bolster your unique identity by tying together the graphical asset creation and the imagery itself. For example, being cropped into a certain shape, or with a coloured overlay or gradient over the top.
? Image Bank - An image bank allows you to continue to refine your visual identity using imagery based on what is impactful to your target audience, not what appeals to you. For example, office-based images are typically synonymous with... you guessed it. Offices. We would recommend definitely trying to mix these up with something outside the box to ensure your brand stands out.
02 SITEMAP
A sitemap is a list of pages of a website within a domain. The best way to understand a sitemap is to think of it as a tree.
The trunk of the tree is the base which represents your home page.
The few large branches that extend from the trunk represent your top-level pages (e.g About Us).
The smaller branches that extend from the large branches represent your second-level pages (e.g About Us > Team).
The leaves that sprout off some of the branches represent specific pages that fall under that level’s theme (e.g About Us > Team > About Pete Smith).
Here's an example of what a sitemap should look like in the planning phase...
This will be typically done by your web agency of choice. That being said there are some amazing user-friendly resources to draft one yourself like www.gloomaps.com which you can always pass on as a starting point to work from.
Your sitemap is an integral part of your website for many different reasons. You wouldn’t build a house without blueprints so why would you build a website without a sitemap? It’s strategically the same thing.
Without really knowing it, website visitors are controlled by the website's sitemap. A well-thought-out sitemap can make visitors do what you want them to do, go where you want them to go and click on what you want them to click.
Every page should have a specific purpose/objective. Companies can be drawn into having multiple sub-pages when it's not entirely necessary and chances are they can be merged into one page.
We've given an example of what a typical 10 pager would look like. But a lot of recruitment companies are now looking at 1-6 page websites which can cover everything. It just means being more clever with design. For example not having tonnes of copy always present on the page but utilising pop-ups or hover states as alternative ways to display the information, or having longer, cleaner web pages.
Answer these IMPORTANT questions and it should give you a much clearer idea of how your sitemap will look so you can get planning...
? What Does The Buyer Persona Of Your Ideal Customer Look Like (e.g Demographics, Characteristics, Likes, Dislikes)?
? What Is The Primary Objective Of Your Website And Each Individual Page? (e.g Generate Leads, Build Brand Awareness)?
? What Is The Unique Selling Proposition Of Your Website Versus Your Competitors (e.g. Experience, Tech/Tools, Brand Story)?
? What Information Do You Consider To Be Your Strongest Or Most Relevant (e.g. Services, Values, Job Listings)?
? What Information Do You Consider To Be Your Weakest Or Least Relevant?
? What Changes To Your Business Are You Looking To Make In The Coming Months And Years (e.g. Grow The Team, Consolidate Services, Add Locations)?
If you found this helpful keep an eye out for Part 2 in a fortnights time and don't forget to click SUBSCRIBE for more of this every Friday...
As ever if a website project is on the horizon in the coming months don't hesitate to get in touch!
View our 2022 Showreel here.
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The Brand Growth Hub is now live with all our resources in one place!
https://www.boldidentities.com/brand-growth