Create a website that reflects the essence of you and your business!
You know that you can make a great first impression using your colours and personality when you dress.
You can make an equally great impression using your colours and personality when you create the website for your business.
Your personal branding should incorporate your essence, whether you are a rock star, freelancing copywriter, personal coach, or a massage therapist.
You have a business. You know your colours. You know your style.
You need a website.
What to keep in mind when planning your own website:
Show the real you
Your brand identity is the face of your business, and your website should be a reflection of you, who you are and what you can contribute. Forget trend colours. Forget the latest craze. Focus on your authentic self, your personality, and your colours. That's what builds trust and fuels the relationship with your clients.
Safety
Protection from spammers and hackers
Usability
User friendly but without sacrificing style
Conversion
Make it easy to find and use your product or service
Total control
You are editing and adding content yourself
Safety
Protection from spammers and hackers is paramount. This is important that you set up in WordPress even before you think about the style and content of your website. Once this is in place, you can sleep well at night while you have fun with colours and content.
User friendliness
Custom fonts are fun, but not smart for website use. Stay with the conventional google fonts or web safe fonts. Instead, infuse the website with personality and brand colours, without sacrificing the readability of your content.
Mailing list
Even if you don't have an online store, it's always smart to start building your mailing list right from the start. Keeping in touch with your audience is so important. If you don't have a dialogue with your audience, you miss out on getting to know them! And you want to get to know them. They are your most precious asset.
This is why you always, always must make sure people can have the possibility to keep in touch with you. And you always want to do this with your brand identity in mind:
Conversion focus
Like I said above, the most important thing of all is to keep in touch with your existing contacts, and create ways for prospective contacts and clients to get in touch. There is no point in having a website if it doesn't drive business to you and attracts the right customers. There are several ways to ensure this. My best advice is to use a conversion focused theme for your website. I have used Thrive Themes for many years now and can heartily recommend using it:
Not only can you fine tune the theme colours and custom create a brand image that fits you to the smallest detail, every element in building the website has focus on how you best can nurture the relationship with your existing audience, and with tons of tips on how to expand your reach and capture the interest of new customers.
Total control
And the best part is, once you have the site up and running, you are in complete control of editing and adding content. No more contacting an expensive bureau that invoices for every word and comma, you do it so easily yourself, with a cup of coffee in hand and on your own time.
Thrive Themes
I love WordPress. WordPress allows regular people like you and me to create websites, with a minimum of technical abilities. I used to make do with WordPress themes, but was always frustrated with the very limited colour palettes. At the most there would be two or three different colour combos available, and none of them would be remotely close to what I had envisioned. And then I discovered Thrive Themes and that really was a game changer for me, allowing me to focus on the creative side of making a web site, and on filling the website with useful content for my audience while at the same time keeping my brand identity completely aligned with my Season (Bright Winter, as many of you know) and personal preferences (I am a minimalist, but if I wanted to, I could make a richly elaborate design using Thrive, should I have wanted to). I have created both this website and fargeporten.no (the Norwegian version) using Thrive, and am able to fine tune the colour scheme and all details just the way I like it. If you want to avail yourself of my affiliate link: find out more about Thrive here.
New blog post series
I'm, starting a new blog series to help you along, with tips for how to infuse your Season's magic into your brand identity and website.
Light Spring branded website
Light Spring has a unique way of expressing a professional image.Dressing as
True Autumn branded website
True Autumn has a down-to-earth practicality that is important to infuse into
Bright Spring branded website
Bright Spring has an exuberant energy that should shine through in your
Soft Summer branded website
Create a website that reflects the dignified elegance of Soft Summer!You know
If you're still struggling
If the thought of setting up a WordPress website scares you, hire me. I can do it for you. I can secure your side against hackers and spammers and set up the few elementary plug-ins you need to ensure your site is running reliably to get you started.
I can also create the whole Thrive Themes site for you once you've secured your Thrive Themes membership, and make it in your brand colours and brand identity throughout, ready for you to fill with content, and I can even populate it with content for you if you want a total care-free start, so that all you have to do is edit when some changes are in order. Or leave that to me, too.
Style is is not limited to clothes.
Brand identity with Nordic Simplicity
build trust by showing your clients who you really are!
I call my approach Colour and Style with Nordic Simplicity because being Norwegian, I want to share an understated, soft spoken, quiet and simple way of expressing yourself.
And that includes the way you use colour in your website and your other brand elements.