Month: June 2020

Personal Branding

5 Ways to Revolutionize Your Personal Brand for More Success

Whether they realize it or not, everyone has a personal brand. 

Your personal brand is all of who you are in public. If you get dressed to the nines to go grocery shopping, you’ve got a fancy brand. If you never swear, you might have a wholesome brand. 

Your personal brand isn’t necessarily who you are as a person. It’s more about how the world sees you. Yet if you want to be authentic, those two things should be aligned.

So your personal brand might feel boring to you. Because, well, it’s just you. 

But there are ways to revolutionize your personal brand to set yourself up for success. 

In this post I’m going to share five tips to supercharge your brand to help you stand out in your industry. 

1. Be the YOUest You

You’ve probably heard that Dr. Seuss quote that goes, “there is no one alive who is youer than you.” And that’s true. 

Too many people try to make their mark by acting like someone else. They try to mimic another personal brand that works. But the problem is that most people see right through that.

People love to see other people just being authentically themselves. And do you know why? Because it’s incredibly brave. Most people are scared to be themselves, which is why they love to see others doing it. It gives other people permission to do the same. 

2. Get Yourself Out There

To have a personal brand online, you’re going to need to get yourself out there on social media. You don’t necessarily need to spend all day on social channels, but you should invest your time in one or two social sites or apps that speak to you.

If you have very limited time to communicate who you are, you may have the most success on YouTube. This way, people around the world can get a feel for your personality and what you stand for immediately. And you can position yourself as an expert in your field rather quickly.

3. Use Consistent Messaging

You don’t need to come up with a catchphrase (unless you really want to), but you should be consistent in how you address people in your audience. Figure out what’s unique about your audience and come up with a nickname or a way to address them. 

Don’t make the mistake of calling them fans or anything that makes you seem like a raging narcissist. But instead try to find something that addresses their interests. If you’re stuck, check out this list of strangely unique job titles for some inspiration. Use this and other consistent messaging across all channels to reinforce your branding.

Whether a message is written or spoken, everyone should be able to tell it came from you. This means that you should be careful about outsourcing unless you have stringent brand guidelines. 

4. Create “A Look” 

In line with consistent messaging, you’re also going to want to create consistent imaging. This means using the same color palette for graphics, and it may also mean adding the same filter to every photo. Decide what works best for your brand and stick with it. It’s okay to switch things up here and there, but consistency is key in personal branding.

5. Refine Your Offer

In order to keep people interested, you’re going to have to provide value. So it’s up to you to decide what value you’re going to provide.

What can you offer that would be of greatest interest to people? And even if you’re giving away information for free, you’re going to want to find a way to monetize your personal brand. Create a brand plan before you start trying to monetize. This will help keep your message and purpose on track.

So, are you ready to revolutionize your personal brand?

Digital BrandingPersonal Branding

7 Reasons Why Users Interface Design Plays An Important Role In Web Development

In today’s digital age, having a website is not an option anymore. Every business must have a website and maintain a healthy digital presence in order to attract prospects. When it comes to a business website, user experience is everything. If a user lands on your website and leaves with a bad taste in their mouths due to poor user experience, they will never return to your website again.

Similarly, if a user visits your website and gets a great user experience, they will surely return to your website. User interface of your website can make or break your website because it is what influences the user experience your website visitors will get. If you have not diverted all your energies and resources towards improving the user interface design during web development, your users will always get a below par user experience.  As a website developer in New York, your main goal should be to make the user interface a joy to use for your users.

In this article, you will learn about seven reasons why user interface design plays a critical role in web development.

Clarify Brand Vision

Just like your brand vision, your target audience should be the focal point of your user interface design. When you design user interfaces with users in mind, you tend to create user interfaces that your users will love to use. It will also help you to refine your design and make changes based on user behavior and preferences. UI/UX design agencies here actively use this in their work.

In addition to this, design agency also clarifies your brand vision and gives you a better understanding of what your brand is all about and what you are offering to your customers. This will give a clear direction to your branding efforts and will increase your chances of your marketing campaigns to become successful. If you are lucky, you can also gain a competitive advantage over your competitors as well.

Improves Website Usability

To create stunning user interfaces, you need to develop a better understanding of your user preferences and behavior. Once you have done that, it will be easier for you as a web developer to provide them what they are looking for on your website. Moreover, this can also help you decide which features and functionality you should include and which ones to leave out from your website.

When users only get what they need, it will improve their user experience and make your website a pleasure to use. Take user input and feedback and tweak your website user interface from time to time. This will not only give a new look to your website but also sends a clear message to users that you value their input.

Enhance Customer Satisfaction

When you pay extra attention to website usability and improve the user experience of your website, it will directly impact customer satisfaction in a good way. When your website visitors are able to perform the action they want every time, they would surely keep coming back to your website for more because their customer satisfaction level is sky high. All you have to do is to maintain that customer satisfaction level by delivering a great website experience on a consistent basis. You will see a massive improvement in conversions and revenue while your website’s bounce rate will decrease drastically. 

Make Website Navigation Easier

What are the main characteristics of great user interface? It is easy to use and has all the elements at familiar places so that the users don’t have to go looking for it. When users get what they are looking for instantly, they will stay on your website longer and explore other pages of your website. Make it easier for them to jump from one page of your website to another by placing a navigation button at a prominent spot where users can easily see and click on it. Avoid hidden and cascading navigation menus as it can hamper the user experience. Hamburger menus might work great for smaller screens such as smartphones but it might not be such a great choice for the desktop version of your website.

Deliver Seamless Experience

Nobody likes to wait, especially your website visitors. If your website takes ages to load and makes your website visitors wait before they can interact with your website, it will destroy the user experience of your website. Even when your website is loaded, make sure that it responds to user inputs instantly. There should be no lag or stutters. That is where website optimization comes into play.

Get rid of extras from your website to make it nimble so it can load up quickly and respond to user inputs without any delays. Use a content delivery network and minify code to improve the website speed. You can also compress multimedia files such as images and videos so they can load quickly even on slow internet connections.

Boost Conversions and Rankings

When users can easily get the information they are looking for and complete the desired action, you are more likely to convert them into paying customers. If you consistently deliver great user experiences, users will start trusting you and will start to show interest in doing business with you. With search engines like Google paying attention to user experience factors and ranking websites based on that, a website that delivers a better user experience will rank higher than a website that doesn’t.  

Anticipate Customer Expectations

When users are the center of attention of all your user interfaces and a lot of research has gone into designing those user experiences, you can easily identify user behavior and preferences patterns. This enables you to anticipate their next move and fulfill customer expectations in a much better way than before. This way, you can make it easier for them to take the next step and convert prospects into paying customers.

How does user interface design impact web development in your opinion? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.

About the author

Usman A. Khan – Digital marketer at Branex – a website design company. He is a curious soul and spends his time learning and researching new subjects every day including – technology and website design. He regularly pours out his learnings as a blog on various platforms and wants to leave his mark on the digital landscape.

Digital Branding

Reasons to Hire a Web Designer

Have you have found enough reason to set up a website for your business but still do not know whether you should hire a local web designer?

Look out for these four signs that direct that you need to find a professional web designer.

1. You are too busy to build the site

Website design takes a lot of time. You need to go through the fundamentals slowly as you develop a robust site that will aid your business goals. You have to come up with a unique design that speaks out your brand and makes your business stand out from the rest of the competition.

If you are too busy to spend quality time on building your business website, you could miss a golden opportunity to get traffic to your company. People won’t take a second look at your site if it is not aesthetically pleasing.

You do not want to waste the chance to get people on your site. If you are busy with other things, the best thing is to contact a web designer and let them build a proper site for your company.

If you hire the right one, they will dedicate the quality time needed to bring the site of your dreams to life. This way, you won’t lose sleep about fixing time in your busy schedule for web development.

2. You are not an experienced web developer

Your site is a vital aspect of your company. It is essential that you put in the right houses to create a perfect site for your company. If you have never done this before, it can be hard to build a proper site that helps to attain your business goals.

You cannot just build a basic website and hope that it drives results for your company. You need to go through a lot of things in the planning of the process and assess how each element you add affects the user and their experience. If you have never built a website before, you might not be in a good position to create the perfect site for your business.

By hiring a local web developer, you bring experience in building profitable sites. They understand how to piece different parts of your site and how they can individually contribute to your business goals.

3. You are not familiar with driving results through your site

It is not out of the picture for companies to have a starting point for their site. You could have a rough idea of how you would like the website to appear, but you might not understand everything that needs to be done for it to drive the best results.

Various elements can collectively add up to a certain experience for your audience. A simple aspect of a site such as adding a video or a Call-to-action button can go a long way in affecting how people react to your content. If you have no idea about all the things required for a website, contact an expert web designer who will help you to determine all these things that are needed.

By hiring a local web designer, you will work with a seasoned professional that will help you find out what is needed for your website. They will adopt your rough ideas and bring them to life while consulting you along the way to ensure that they create the correct thing. This makes sure that at the end of it all, you get the right site that brings in good results for your company.

4. You need a standout site that differentiates you from the competition.

When bringing up your ideal site, you need it to be above the competition. It is vital to have a special site that is made to create a memorable experience for your audience.

If you decide to make the site on your own, you will most likely rely on a template builder to create it. These builders make it easy for you to bring up the site, but they do not make your site any different from all the others in the niche. You will look similar to all the other sites that have utilized similar templates.

You need to create a site that stands out from your competitors. If you contact a web developer, they will assist you to create a custom site that works for your company. You will get one that gives customers a unique experience and stands out from the rest.