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Modernizing Traditional Websites And Serious Brands
We discuss how a traditional brand and website can be modernized without losing their seriousness.
In a previous article, we answered the question of when to consider refreshing your brand. In it, we said that brands need to update their messaging in order to keep up with the ever shifting market dynamics and customer preferences.
But what if you run a business in a particularly serious field, like law, finance or medicine?
You might be hesitant to update your brand and website, fearing that you might alienate your audience or risk your reputation. You might have the view that modern websites are simply too bold, too modern, too distracting with colors and animations.
In this article, we will discuss how a traditional brand and website can be modernized without losing their seriousness. We will show how following timeless design principles and making use of modern technologies can elevate a traditional brand while staying true to its roots.
As we discussed in a previous article, a brand’s visual identity consists of multiple elements: a logo, color palette, typography, imagery, etc. These elements should support and complement each other and should all adhere to a general unifying vision.
As a business grows, as its competitive landscape changes, as its position in the market shifts and as its customers’ preferences evolve, its brand identity needs to be continuously revisited and, if needed, updated. This is true for progressive and traditional brands alike. The difference lies in the core values and messages the brands convey.
For professionals in law, healthcare, or finance, for example, they typically include trust, expertise, and dependability.
If you run a law firm, your brand likely needs to project authority and reliability, as potential clients want to feel confident in your expertise and ability to handle sensitive, complex legal matters.
If you’re involved in a medical practice, your brand probably needs to emphasize care, compassion and trust, as your patients seek reassurance that they will receive the best possible treatment.
If you own a financial services company, projecting stability and security may be what’s most important. Your clients need to feel assured that their money and financial future are in safe hands.
Of course, your brand can deviate from and build upon these basic messages, allowing you to differentiate yourself from other businesses.
The core messages you choose to convey will determine what visual elements are appropriate for your brand. An experienced graphic designer or agency should be able to recognize the best way to translate your messages to visuals.
For rebranding of traditional businesses, this is usually achieved by applying subtle, gentle design changes to the established brand.
For example, your existing logo might use a standard serif typeface like Times New Roman. A graphic designer might propose a number of alternative serif fonts that do not stray too far from the old look but allow you to differentiate your brand better.
Also, your logo might contain visual elements like geometric shapes or icons. These elements can be kept but refreshed to make use of better design software.
The color palette can also be improved whilst still reflect the seriousness of your brand. If you use traditional colors like navy blue, deep green, black, and white to evoke a sense of stability and trustworthiness, you can keep them. However, introducing subtle accent colors like muted shades of gold or burgundy can add sophistication without becoming too bold.
In terms of imagery, perhaps your branded materials like brochures use stock photos of business professionals or bland office shots. As these pictures often look dated, they can be replaced with high-resolution, premium organic images. Your business photo, those of your team members and your office or practice can also be replaced with new, professional ones.
As all of these examples illustrate, subtle but powerful improvements can be made to the elements of a serious brand’s visual identity without it losing touch with its traditional roots.
The updated visual brand identity will serve as the basis for the business’ new site, which will be designed according to its principles.
In addition to the updated brand colors, typography, imagery and logo, the website will be created according to the latest web design principles and best practices.
To be successful, a website needs to be well designed with the user in mind, its layout needs to be clear, its information needs to be easily digestible, and the user needs to be guided to perform actions important to your business. These include getting in touch with you through a contact form, booking an appointment, downloading or uploading information, etc.
To achieve this, web designers structure the content in sections and pages, use visual elements like icons and graphics, guide users with calls to action (CTAs) like “sign up today”, and subtly influence their behavior with interactions and animations.
None of these elements need to be flashy or aggressive. Animations, for example, can be as subtle as text turning bold or shapes changing color when hovered over with a mouse. They will still achieve the desired effect of guiding user behavior. An experienced designer of agency will only use elements that reinforce the brand, not ones that clash with it.
All of the elements described above need to be taken into account, in order to make a website successful. Not doing so can make the website, and by extension your brand, look more dated than traditional.
Perhaps your website was great back in the day, but the web is a rapidly changing domain with ever evolving user expectations. The reality is that failing to meet these expectations can result in lost business, regardless of how competent you are in your field.
One critical feature users expect today is for the site to look and work well on any device they view it from, especially their mobile phone. This can be particularly hard or even impossible to achieve for websites built with older technology. If you choose to work with us on your website redesign, we will build your website on Webflow, a platform designed for multiple screen sizes.
Old websites also often fail in their layout. That is because they can often look cluttered and rigid, overflowing with large and poorly spaced pieces of text. Websites used to look like walls of text, but in recent years users’ perception of space on the web, particularly empty or white space, has changed. In our experience, they now expect more breathing room between elements on the website.
Related to this, old websites rarely make effective use of icons, illustrations, graphs, and images that make content easier to digest and that users have grown to expect.
Finally, a website built with old technology might not support the functionality that customers want.
In addition to the increasing demands web users place on the sites they visit, search engines penalize outdated, poorly performing sites by ranking them lower in search results. That is because search engines reward engaging websites that capture users’ attention, and the way to do that is to follow the design principles described above.
Ranking low on search results can become a real danger to your business as it can begin to lose ground to competitors who rank higher, allowing them to capture more customer traffic. This is where SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, comes into play. It involves a set of techniques and principles to make a website search-engine friendly. If you choose to work with us, as we mentioned above, we will build your Website on Webflow, a platform that allows us to set strong SEO fundamentals for your site.
In summary, a serious website, like its underlying brand, can benefit greatly from the technical and visual improvements of a full redesign. This can ensure that your business doesn’t fall behind in the digital race while retaining its traditional quality.
To make the most of a brand and website refresh, we recommend working with an experienced designer or agency to create a website that is clearly structured, beautiful, fast, and optimized for search engines.
As we have shown, a serious brand can be successfully updated without losing its traditional quality. This can be achieved by improving its logo, typography, color palette, imagery and other elements in subtle yet effective ways.
A traditional website, too, can be redesigned within the brand’s serious guidelines. To do this, designers can make use of subtle interactions and animations, improved layouts, custom graphics and icons, and other elements. The site’s speed, performance and mobile-friendliness can also be greatly improved in tandem with its visual design to address the growing expectations of web users and to improve the site’s ranking on search engines.
These changes can prevent your business’ brand and website from looking dated rather than traditional and can help you reach potential new customers while not alienating your traditional base.
If you choose to work with us on your brand and website redesign, send us your brief!
Get in touch today!
