Design is something that most people think they can do, but you can tell almost instantly when something is deigned professionally and when someone with “paint” has had a go. You might think that you’re Ethan Allan but you’re probably more of a Lisa Frank… Whether or not we like it, we all judge books by their covers, and first impressions definitely count. When it comes to B2B inbound marketing and aiming to stand out, it’s important to follow the best practices of B2B web design, especially as you do not want potential leads landing on your homepage and bouncing out because it looks:
- Too Busy
- Too Empty
- Too Loud
- Too Terrifying
You get the point. A good website should be like a well put together room. Luckily the wonderful world of the Internet has a couple of IKEA-like template solutions for you to download and sick together with glue, especially if you use WordPress .
It’s important that businesses realize that developing a brand requires time invested in developing standardized modern professional design. There are several essential elements that you simply cannot afford to skimp on.
The Importance of Color
This may seem artsy fartsy but color plays a large role in how we perceive a company, brand, or product.
84.7% of people cite color as a reason that they buy a product.
When developing a color scheme, or choosing a color for your brand, select three complimentary colors - primary, secondary and tertiary. Color theory is long and complicated and we aren’t going to bore you with the details now, just trust that it’s very important and there is a bunch of psychobabble behind it. Thank you “Bufferapp” for the infographic and the color definitions.
Basically:
- Blue = Trust, Strength, Dependability, Honesty
- Purple = Royal, Sophistication, Mysterious
- Green = Wealth, Health, Serenity, Prestige
- Yellow = Positivity, Warmth, Motivation, Creativity
- Orange = Vitality, Fun, Playful, Youth
The color emotion guide you see here is actually what we used here at Penguin Strategies when we were defining our own brand. As a B2B marketing agency, we wanted to express creativity but ultimately found it more important that our clients found us trustworthy and dependable. For this reason, we join 33% of the world’s brands that use blue as the primary color in their logos.
Style Guides
A style guide isn’t someone who does your shopping for you, it’s a document that will help you apply your color and fonts throughout your website making sure that everything looks properly consistent. We suggest you use a “style guide” to keep track of all the design decisions that you make that might need to be applied in the future else where in your website. When it comes to producing branded content and landing pages later, a style guide will be invaluable!
You should also understand which font styles are the most effective for web copy and include that information in your style guide. You need to make sure your font can be read across multiple devices and platforms. Any of the fonts in the San Serif font family are effective for both desktop and mobile, because they are simple enough to load properly on any “canvas” without creating additional visual noise. A great example of this would be “Lato” or “Helvetica” (the font used on our website).
Design is Awesome
Testing out colors, fonts and layouts can help you understand what works for you and your business. We definitely recommend taking the visual design period slowly. It’s a good idea to do at least a couple of A/B tests to get the hang of what it is that makes your clients stick around and not just bounce straight off your home page.
Featured Image Source: Flickr User UX Mastery
by The Penguin Team on November 17, 2014
As a leading B2B digital marketing agency, We help B2B Technology Companies, enterprise software, and hardware companies increase brand awareness, reach more qualified leads and close more customers. Penguin Strategies is a Diamond Partner of HubSpot.
