9 Proven Website Branding Techniques To Build Trust

Establishing a strong online presence for your business is a process that will definitely require meticulous planning and execution. You have to go every possible extra mile if you want to win the trust of today’s customers because they are very discerning. The feeling users will get on your website should give them confidence in your brand’s ability to offer a satisfying solution. It is therefore in your best interest to create the best website branding and keep perfecting it over time. You don’t want any of your potential customers to doubt your ability to deliver, so make sure your website has every little element that can boost visitors’ confidence or provide any piece of evidence that can build trust.

Now that you have a good idea of what you will need to achieve, let’s look at the 9 techniques you can make use of to improve your website.

Build a strong corporate identity

Customers will take your brand seriously if the website they find online has a professional look. It is therefore absolutely important to build the right corporate identity including a professional logo and a color scheme applied consistently throughout the website. This should also be extended to other opportunities of engaging with your audience, so even when sending out emails remember to include the logo and other elements of your corporate identity. Such efforts will definitely go a long way in creating the desired image for your brand. Whenever web users search for your business name online, they should easily find and recognize your logo. Including your professional photo in your website is also a nice idea as it gives it a face that potential customers can easily recognize and associate with your brand.

Provide useful content

You must genuinely engage your online audience with useful content that helps them understand the value you promise to provide. If you thought “salesy” content is all you need to generate sales, forget it. Today’s discerning customers have probably already done their research before visiting your website. They already know what they are looking for, so you ought to have done your homework right to provide facts and convince them how valuable your offering is. You will need to provide tips on how their problems can be solved. Use text, images and videos where necessary in order to create the most engaging content for your website. That might make them keep coming back until they trust and buy your product. Such high quality content should also be published on your blog. Make your audience believe that you are truly a thought leader in your given field.

Create a great ‘About Us” page

Any professional business website should have an “About Us” page answering the most critical questions about its identity, core values, mission, vision and similar things. The most serious visitors are likely to be interested in that section of your website as it lets them quickly know about your business and what it stands. Be creative and provide information that you know will matter to your potential customers as they consider buying from you. A good idea is to include professional photos of your team if any and providing the areas of their expertise.

Display project portfolio

Think about the impact of providing real evidence to your potential customers about what you can do? Professional videos, photos and descriptions that can highlight your work in past projects will significantly boost your conversion rates. The professional work portfolio will certainly convince your website visitors to trust in your brand and convert them to buyers.  

Display client logos

If you have worked for any serious clients before, make sure to show off their logos on your website. Potential customers would definitely be impressed to see you have already contributed to the success of other brands. They would also want to use your product or service expecting to achieve success as well.

Showcase testimonials

Providing the words your past or existing clients have used to positively describe your product or service can be one of the most powerful sources of trust for your brand. Potential customers are more likely to trust such words as they will consider them not biased unlike your own words.

Badges or stickers

If you truly believe in the value that your brand represents and wouldn’t hesitate to stand by it, then why not display any badges or stickers that will precisely make that point? If you provide a money back guarantee, don’t just say it but show it prominently using a sticker. Such a sticker should of course be displayed next to the “buy now” button as it will likely boost your potential buyers’ confidence. Similarly, if your business is Better Business Bureau (BBB) Accredited, showing that on your website will definitely increase the trust potential customers are likely to have in your brand.

Build Social media pages

Potential customers are likely to believe that your brand is big enough if it commands sizeable social media following. A discerning customer does a thorough research and will want to find out if you have social media pages and if so how many followers you have there. Your business profiles on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are particularly very important for branding and engagement with targeted audience. Social media integration into your website also significantly improves audience reach. People may trust the information shared by their friends, family members or colleagues in their social networks. If that’s about your brand, eventually it may translate into sales.

Provide trusted payment options

Payments are perhaps the most sensitive areas of online transactions. Customers do not want to be victims of online fraud and therefore want to use payment options they can easily recognize. Display recognized images for each payment option allowed on your website. That will make things far much easier for the customers. You do not want a customer to leave when they have already added their chosen items in the shopping cart. Adding every bit of payment convenience possible will go a long way in optimizing your conversion rates.

Conclusion

Website branding is not a one-time activity, but rather a continuous process that begins from the time your business idea is conceived. It is about every aspect that has to do with the look and feel of your brand. This has even become more important for the online presence of businesses in order to stand out from the competition. Winning the trust of your potential customers online demands a lot of efforts, so the 9 proven techniques discussed here should only help you get started.

Zmartframe - Dual Functions Multi Touch Windows Android Overlay

Zmartframe is an innovation that aims to reincarnate old PC monitors into main units of the new era. The device will help millions of users around the world to enjoy multi touch technology on their old monitors instead of disposing them. The technology is going to work with Windows operating systems from Windows XP, Windows 7 to Windows 8, while at the same time allowing an Android PC mode for users to enjoy the numerous Android apps available today.

The world's first dual functions multi touch Windows Android overlay frame for PC monitor is an innovation is led by a group of young experts with a wealth of experience in the areas of technology development and product development. Touch is increasingly becoming an important basic input method which makes computer system interactive. Many users have been throwing away their old PC monitors because they could not enjoy the technology. Zmartframe is the piece of technology that adds the multi touch capability to the old monitors. With the Zmartframe innovation for old PC monitor reincarnation, eWaste will significantly be reduced around the world and positively contribute in saving our planet from numerous environmental challenges.

Zmartframe comes with an embedded Android system and that is why it works with both Windows and Android. That enables users to benefit from multi touch technology while using their PC with monitors that were once non-touchable. The Android platform as a very powerful standalone main unit helps take over about 99% PC functions. Millions of andoid apps are available today and users can enjoy them with Zmartframe and avoid unnecessarily replacing and throwing away the old monitors.

The mass production of Zmartframe products to make them available worldwide is set to start as soon the current phase target of $200,000 through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign is realized.

Responsive Web Design Benefits

There is no doubt that today responsive web design is the best way to go. If you want to optimize your audience reach, you should a responsive design so that your website can guarantee great accessibility, availability, reliability and performance across all the major technology platforms. There is no doubt that today web users demand great ease of use and convenience. Desktops and laptops are not the only devices used to access the web today as a plethora of web-enabled devices exist today from notebooks, netbooks, tablets and smartphones to TV sets and game consoles like X-box that come with browsers.

While taking care of your business needs and targeted audience is critical to help design a website that best represents your brand online, you must ensure that your website is available and accessible to web users on all web-enabled gadgets. This is achieved through responsive web design techniques and helps to future-proof your website investments. Technology is changing fast while you want to reduce the efforts of redesigning your website frequently. It allows you not only to cut down cost over the long term but to focus more on your business strategies. You free more time in order to focus on adding fresh content on your website to attract more visitors and achieve more conversion rates.

You need scalable website preferably with modules for separate functions. Modular web design makes it easier to manage different areas of your website separately and therefore reduces downtimes during inevitable ongoing maintenance processes. If one module develops some bugs, you can easily fix them without affecting the performance of the entire website as the rest of its modules will continue functioning as usual.

Page Numbers In Roman And Regular Numbers In MS Word Office 2007 Tips

Do you want to create a document with some pages numbered in Romans (i, ii, iii, etc) and the following pages numbered with regular numbers (1, 2, 3, etc)? You can easily do that in Microsoft Word from Office 2007 or even later versions. Do not rush in applying the page numbers as you do for simple documents that do not have sections. The secret in applying different formats of page numbers within the same document lies in the use of section breaks. If your document has a cover page, that is the first section, table of contents comes in the second section while the first chapter starts in the third section.

Cover Page Without Page Numbers

The cover page will not require a page number. To make sure this does not happen, follow these steps:

1.   Click on the cover page

2.   Go to ‘Page Layout’ menu and click on ‘Page Setup’.

3.   In the ‘Page setup’ dialogue box click on the ‘Layout’ tab

4.   Check the ‘Headers and footers’ section to check the box against ‘Different first page’.

After completing the above steps, you cover page will be excluded from any page numbering that applies to other sections.

Create Section Break And Start Roman Page Numbering

Now go to the page where you want the section with roman page numbers to start and complete the steps below:

1.   Go to ‘Page Layout’ menu

2.   Click on the ‘Insert Page and Section Breaks’ icon as shown in the image below

  

3.   Click ‘Next Page’

4.   Go to the ‘Insert’ menu

5.   Click on ‘Page Number’ and then ‘format Page Numbers’

6.   Choose the roman number format if that is what you prefer

7.   Click on the ‘Start at’ radio button and type in ‘i’ without the quotes then click ok.

After the above steps, roman page numbers will apply from that section to the end of your document. Do not worry about that but follow the steps given below.

Create Section Break And Start Regular Page Numbering

Now you must create another section break starting from the page where you want regular numbers to start. Follow these steps:

1.   Follow the same steps given earlier to create a section break.

2.   Follow the same procedure given earlier to insert page numbers, but this time under ‘Number format’ choose regular numbers (1, 2, 3, etc), and also check the ‘Start at’ radio button and type in ‘1’.

If you have successfully done everything as instructed from the beginning of this article, you should now have a document with the following three sections:

1.   Section 1 for cover page with no page number

2.   Section 2 with roman page number format

3.   Section 3 with regular page number format

There you have it, great tips on how to insert roman page numbers and regular page numbers on the same document. This is useful when working on academic research papers, dissertations and so on. If you were happy to do it after following the instructions, make sure to share with your friends on facebook, twitter, Google+ or any other social network.