Branding and promotion of your product/website is the essential key to
your business's success. This is the reason why various marketing
strategies and techniques are being implemented for the successful
promotion of your websites. One such important aspect for successful
marketing in tough economic times is designing style guidelines for your
websites.
It is true that if you are a web master who own, run, or
design a website, you need to religiously follow a style guide. The
style guide tells you how to format the texts, images and other content
of your website. Also, by creating a style guide, you are effectively
establishing rules for others who can take over from you in near future.
Why create a style guide to design your website?
- It serves as a tool to ensure consistency across your website
- It can be the repository for designing guidelines and standards for your website
- Can behave as a training aid for new members of the team.
- It makes you look professional
- You have a control on your design
- A compromise on deign, message and branding can be avoided.
- Gets you a design which is consistent and more cohesive, a design that defines your own style.
Some common issues prevalent in your website that a style guide solves include;
- The top heading should be kept bold, or bold and italic both, or none.
- The image on the right side of the text is okay or it should be centered between the texts.
- What name will be given to your business, mycompany.com, my company Pvt. Ltd., www.company.com or something entirely different?
Designing Style Guidelines for Website - What to Include?
Logos - In the web world, logos play important role, and where most brands
revolve around them. Therefore, the logos should be provided with
variations and placed on the right location on a page so that it seeks
maximum attention. The correct usage of logos is to provide them with
different colors, and specify what colours are allowed to make it more
appealing.
Spacing - What people usually do is that they
underestimate the importance of white spacing on a web page. To include
white spacing on the page is essential especially to highlight the logo
and make content clearly visible.
Colors - Colors play important
role in making a site attractive. Specify primary and secondary colors
and when and where to use them.
Fonts – This is an important
area to pay attention by you. It is required to define the size, type,
spacing, color and line height of the texts. And how the font used in
the body should be kept different from the headlines and sub heading.
Make sure to include Web alternatives for non-Web fonts.
Layout –
A consistency in the layout is required which can be done by setting up
some generic templates that helps in curbing a lot of creativity while
preparing layout.
Copy writing Guide – While reading, a reader
looks for consistency or a consistent pattern in it, otherwise there
would be an hindrance in the reading and user may leave the page
immediately. For those who write their own copy would need to maintain
consistency, and a copy-writing style guide can be helpful in this case.
Icons – Another way to promote consistency on the site is by defining the use of icons and correct spacing between them.
Navigation – Most important aspect of a website that can make or break it is its
navigation system. After a site is once designed completely, new pages
on the site keeps adding to it. Such things may affect navigation of the
site.
Basic Coding Guidelines – You may be the best person for
coding purpose but following the basic style guideline will reduce the
possibility of getting it damaged like CSS class naming conventions,
Form styling, JavaScript integration, Doc type and validation
requirements, or any other.
