Theme Personalization Priorities for Marketing Success

Branding is never optional.

Neither is using any default WordPress theme, no matter how premium it is.

Your website is the public face of your company and needs to convey your branding. Use a color scheme and font that your target profile will identify with, and marketing success will follow.

Colors

Colors have different meanings.

But it’s more complicated than that because different colors have different meanings in different countries, so be sure to research your preferred colors carefully.

Men and women react differently to different colors, as do people of different ages and backgrounds. This MagPress article explains why it is essential to aim your product or service at a coherent subset of the population, rather than every one of the 3.8 billion people online.

Understand your clients and choose colors they will have a positive reaction to. Decide which colors will convey your branding message in the best way and use only those colors for headings, highlighting and menus on your site.

It is best to make the page background the same color as your page because a contrasting color is another distraction visitors don’t need.

Use the traditional royal blue for links rather than a brand color, because using green or red for links will confuse users, and confusion means they will leave your site.

Logo

You need to use the same colors you choose for your logo in your web design, so you must have a logo before you start personalizing your WP theme.

A logo needn’t cost you thousands of dollars because you can get great results using free and low-cost online logo makers.

A logo that combines a meaningful graphic and your company name will work best for a new business when you grow as big as Adidas you can switch to just the graphic.

Think Jaguar, Adidas, and Starbucks, and you get the principle.

Fonts

Fonts have meanings, just like colors. You can even have a custom font designed and build your logo around that, but it means a designer must spend many days on your project, so it’s expensive and isn’t for a new business.

Gone are the days when you were limited to Arial, Times and Georgia. You have thousands of fonts to choose from, and if you use one of the many Google fonts, you never need to think about whether your users have that font installed on their devices.

For easy reading, you should use a sans-serif font for the body of your website. Fonts such as Verdana or Calibri work well. Use a serif font like Times, or a decorative font such as Castellar for headings and menus. Script fonts are best kept for your site title image because more they are difficult to read quickly.

Typography

The central principle behind your typography decisions should be to make your web copy easy to read. Your font should be at least 16pts, rather than the more commonly used 10pts or smaller.

Don’t make the common mistake of using too pale a font. Pale or mid-gray on white is hard to read and annoying for site users, so no matter how cool you think it looks, put legibility first when making typography decisions.

The text is easier to read if you leave it unjustified, which will leave a ragged right edge of each paragraph. Paragraph length should vary from one to five lines, with many two and three line paragraphs.

Images

Forget using image libraries. Your website is the only chance you have to build your credibility in your customer’s mind; showing a stock image doesn’t do that.

Take your own photos. You don’t need a $1,000 DSLR camera to take good pictures for your website, but you do need an eye for an interesting shot. For more kudos, be sure to include you and your employees in the frame.

Once you have the basic image, you can edit it yourself using free image editing software, or you can get the job done on a freelancing site.

Your website header image should be a shot of your business, overlaid with your logo and site name in one of your brand colors and a clear font. You can fade or blur the background image slightly if that is the effect you are looking for.

The Short Version

How do you make your company stand out in customers’ minds? Be different.

Your unique proposition and market positioning are much more than a logo, font and website color swatch, but visually that’s all you have, so use them wisely. Be aware of the emotional connotations of your chosen colors and fonts because you need to press the right emotional buttons to make the sale.