How to decide what your brand represents on your Squarespace website

When it comes to branding, author Marty Neumeier in his book Zag writes “a brand is a customer's gut feeling about a product, service, or company.” If you don’t know what your brand stands for yet, don’t worry. Just get started on your Squarespace website and as you build your site, much of what your brand is will emerge as you go.

Note: There are many firms that offer true brand services, which can include creating a brand guide with font and color usage rules, mission statement, mood board and a lot of detailed work to determine your brand. If you can afford these services, a real professional can be an excellent option. But here at Little Ox Workshop, our brand promotes doing it yourself as much as possible and learning on the go from experience. So if you’re not sure where to start, just get started and just start thinking about your values.

One of my favorite books is Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” I credit that book for changing how I operate in life. One of his exercises for readers is to write a personal mission statement. This is an excellent way to help start your branding development for your business. Write a company mission statement and go from there. If you can start to define your core values as a business, express what you stand for, the gut feeling others have for your brand begins to take shape.

Getting Started

Getting started is the hardest part, but once you’ve decided to put pen to paper or start typing on a blank Google Doc, you’ve started. Allow your mind to flow without judgment. You can start with the most superficial (yet important) components of your brand: how it looks.

What colors do you like? I like greys and blues. Don’t overthink it. Record it. Start looking at color palettes. Google Image Search is your best friend in this. Look at companies you like. What style of typography are you drawn to? You can use a Google Chrome Extension called What Font to find out the names of certain fonts.

You can create a mood board. Some people like to create a Pinterest board for their inspiration. I like to keep it simple and just write things down on a Google document. Color codes, links to websites, names of fonts, screenshots, whatever has a possible chance to influence my brand development.

Capture images you like too. I turn to fashion magazines and catalogs because there is a lot of thought into how these images are styled. Plus, I get some use of my junk mail. Art directors have spent quite a bit of time forming the final output, so take some of their cues. What colors are used in the backgrounds? What do certain props or poses express? Simply pick up any inspiration you are drawn to. Use your gut to form others’ gut reactions to your personal or business brand.

How to apply what you’ve gathered

Applying your font pairing in Squarespace

Fortunately, Squarespace makes it easy to create a font pairing and color palette that suits your branding. From your main menu go to Design then Site Styles and click on Fonts. You will see options to change the fonts in Headings, Paragraphs, Buttons and Miscellaneous. Go ahead and type in the name of the font you want to apply. Squarespace offers a nice range of web-safe fonts, which are fonts that will work across a wide range of devices. 

Like I mentioned in my article about how to make your Squarespace site look professional, using smaller font sizes helps project a more elegant look. So play around with your font sizes by toggling the adjustment tools. You could also go really big with your headline fonts for a dynamic effect. 

Applying a color scheme to your Squarespace site

So there are five base colors you can choose from in designing your Squarespace site on version 7.1. I always use a pure white (HEX color #000000) and a pure black (HEX color #FFFFFF) as my lightest and darkest colors. I then choose a really light shade that is close to white as my lighter shade so that I can create subtle distinction between the white backgrounds and light backgrounds. Even if you are creating a dark themed site, I still keep a light shade in my palette to use in situations where I want high contrast.

I then choose a dark shade that is closer to black and also a brighter color as an accent color for my fifth option. These are my general guidelines, but rules are meant to be broken in design. So at the end of the day, you can Google Image Search for a color palette you like or screenshot or photograph your inspiration. Don’t be afraid to manually adjust your colors to get the exact shade you want.

If you are not an experienced designer, try to emulate color mixes that have been selected by professionals. Don’t throw away all the catalogs you get in the mail. If you like a particular clothing brand, there may be inspiration awaiting within their catalogs. One of my favorite color schemes for a brand is Kim Kardashian’s shapewear line Skims. There are a wide range of neutral colors that work well for the feeling the company is trying to convey. I also really like the running apparel company Tracksmith’s use of bright colors within a tame base color. In general bright colors look best when they are tamed by more muted colors.

What do you think of a person who drives a Volkswagen?

Beyond looks, what does your Squarespace website say about you

If you have no substance, you have no substance. So let’s define what your substance is. If you can’t do that, then maybe you need to work on your skillset first. That’s a different story. Let’s assume you’ve identified your innate calling and are ready to tell the world all about it through your Squarespace website. How do you express it in a concise and powerful way?

I used to work at a public relations firm in Manhattan. I learned so much through their process of how to make their clients appear press-worthy. The three questions they always had clients answer are: So what? Who cares? Why you?

These questions have become part of my questionnaire too. They are excellent prompts to help you express your unique points of difference. The best part is that your uniqueness is within you, you just need to get it down on paper first. Oftentimes we are simply too close to ourselves to identify these traits that separate us from the pack. So step outside of your body for a moment and try to observe yourself for a moment. How do others perceive me? What do people say I do well? 

Once you’ve started writing your thoughts down around your brand identity, extract what is most important and use it on your homepage at the top, first and foremost. This is your billboard, the attention grabber that leads the user into your site and urges them to explore.

As you continue to add copy to your homepage, let it unfold like you are telling a story. Does your page have a progression? Is there a point to this story or are you rambling on? Stop yourself if you don’t feel each section is contributing to your goal. Strip away anything that is unnecessary. Use only the strongest parts of your content. Most business websites are intended to drive conversions, or actions that lead to conversions. Leads are great, but conversions are king. 

How do we get to conversion?

The same mentor who taught me the So What Who Cares Why You Trinity taught me the stages of the conversion process. He would tell clients that the pathway to conversion is Know Me, Like Me, Trust Me, Buy Me. It makes sense. Anything from a $10 pair of shoelaces to a $1.2 million home requires those four stages for the buyer to commit to the purchase.

Trustworthiness is the factor that you can really make a difference in with how you design your website. Have you ever been on an e-commerce site that just looks shady? There’s no cohesiveness and the whole site just looks sloppy. Two different sites may sell the same exact product (at the same price), but depending on the design of the site, one site looks a lot more trustworthy to purchase from.

Your goal with your Squarespace website is to achieve affinity with your target audience. But you can’t reach your target unless you define it. I learned to create Ideal Client Avatars to aid in creating those targets. Picture your ideal client. Could it be John, a 45-year-old father of three, who works at a pharmaceutical company in Central New Jersey and enjoys home improvement projects and craft beer? Get specific. Have fun. Line up your targets.

What do you stand for?

There is a concept that’s inherent in the genius Nike slogan Just Do It. The idea that everyone who has a body can be an athlete, to be able to move on his or her own terms, is one that promotes inclusivity. There is a notion that even if you aren’t a world-class athlete, buy purchasing Nike products you can tap into the same gear that the best use.

Of course, Nike products are not actually that different from any other sneakers and apparel in the marketplace. I don’t doubt that there is actual technical innovation. My cousin is a designer for Nike’s Innovation Lab and spent years developing the tech behind an indoor soccer shoe. But at the end of the day, most consumers buy into the Nike brand prestige. Companies like Nike and Apple are kings of providing its customers with a concept that they can identify with. I use Nike and Apple products because I identify with being sleek and cool. I’d never buy a PC because I have the perception that it’s not as sophisticated as an Apple product.

Decide what it is that your company stands for? For Little Ox Workshop, we create clean and elegant Squarespace website designs for those who believe that minimalist design offers the best way to convey information. Of course Nike and Apple’s websites use white backgrounds and have very few extraneous details to get in the way of showcasing their products.

It’s not the only approach that works, but what works is when a brand knows its identity and truly goes after projecting it. When creating your Squarespace website design, find your inspiration and lean into it.

Image choices

Ideally, every website would have professional photographs that are actually of the people or customers of the company. I use a mix of photos taken by a pro and stock images. But the stock images I chose aren’t of computer screens and other predictable website design images. I love the ocean and especially the Pacific even though I am an East Coast boy through and through. Part of me is drawn to the aesthetic of the West Coast but my mindset is more in line with the toughness of my Philadelphia upbringing.

So the images I use on my site showcase my passion for freedom, nature and unfettered creativity. That’s the spirit I take when it comes to website design. I believe you can harness an energy and allow it to permeate into your website. It should have a definite vibe. Your image choices help define it.

There are many options for stock photography and most of it is really hokey. There are, however, so many choices that an abundance of natural-looking photos are available. Look for images that might be used in a magazine instead of ones that are overly posed or have cheesy graphics woven into them in an attempt to overtly convey an idea.

Look for cohesiveness in your image choices. Is there a theme? Is the type of lighting congruous throughout?

Now that you have an overview of how to project what your brand represents on your Squarespace website, just get started. Follow me and get the tools you need to refine your site until you have what looks like a professional design.