ThemeProcess & Planning
CardCard 63 of 64
Questions5 to explore

Website

The brand's home on the world wide web

The website is usually the place where the brand's promise and the brand's reality meet most directly.

The website is often the first thing a potential customer reads after encountering a brand name. It needs to do several things simultaneously: communicate what the brand is and who it is for, build confidence and trust, help visitors find what they need, and move people toward the next step. Getting all of those right requires brand clarity as much as design skill.

Websites also date quickly, both in design language and in content, which means a brand's online home often ends up reflecting where the brand was rather than where it is. The gap between the current brand positioning and the website can be a significant source of confusion for anyone trying to understand what the brand actually stands for today.

How strong brands handle it

The same building block, handled well. These are approaches and illustrations from how brands tend to work, not rules, and never a ranking of companies.

The homepage as brand statement

Stripe's website is studied in design and brand circles because it communicates a clear point of view about the product and the company immediately. The design choices (typography, density, animation) are themselves a signal about what kind of company Stripe is.

Tone in body copy

Basecamp and 37signals have long used their website copy as a brand expression, with direct, opinion-led writing that is distinctive in a category where most competitors use generic benefit statements.

Performance as brand signal

A slow or broken website contradicts quality positioning regardless of the design. Brands that claim to care about experience but run slow, mobile-unfriendly sites send a mixed message that attentive visitors notice.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

If someone visits our website with no prior knowledge of our brand, what would they conclude about who we are and who we serve?
How does the tone and visual language of our website compare to our other brand touchpoints?
Where does our website create confusion or friction for someone trying to understand or engage with us?
How does the website communicate our values and personality, not just our features and pricing?
When did we last revisit the website from the perspective of a first-time visitor who knows nothing about us?

Things to notice

Website copy often gets written by committees and ends up sounding like no one. Generic benefit statements and category clichés make brands look interchangeable, which is the opposite of the website's job.
SEO and brand voice can conflict if SEO is treated as a separate concern. Optimizing content for search in ways that damage readability or tone is a false economy for a brand that needs trust.
The website is frequently out of date with the brand's current positioning. If the brand has evolved, the website is usually the last thing that catches up, which creates confusion for everyone who visits.