How a Style Guide Impacts Your WordPress Website

Having a style guide provides several benefits to businesses and other organizations. It helps maintain credibility by establishing clear standards for design elements, such as colors, fonts, and formatting.

Additionally, a style guide streamlines the content creation process, saving time and effort by providing designers with a reference point for creating cohesive and polished materials, such as sales collateral and your WordPress website. Overall, a well-implemented style guide enhances brand recognition, strengthens marketing efforts, and reinforces a cohesive brand identity.

Consistency in Branding and Messaging

A style guide ensures that all branded materials, whether digital or analog, maintain a consistent look, style, and visual identity. This consistency helps reinforce brand recognition and trust among the target audience by presenting a cohesive and unified brand image across various platforms and touchpoints.

Streamlined Content Creation Process

A style guide facilitates content creation by providing clear formatting and design elements guidelines. Content creators can refer to the style guide for direction, which helps save time and effort, ensuring that materials are produced efficiently and effectively.

Professional Standards

With a style guide in place, businesses can uphold a high standard of professionalism and credibility in their marketing efforts. Clear branding and design standards ensure that your WordPress website is polished and error-free, enhancing the overall quality and perception of the brand.

Enhanced Collaboration and Consensus

A style guide serves as a reference point for all stakeholders involved in creating and approving your WordPress website. A common set of standards and guidelines promotes collaboration and consensus among team members, ensuring everyone is aligned on the brand’s messaging and visual identity.

This is especially important when enlisting the help of a WordPress agency. As WebDevStudios COO Lisa Sabin-Wilson recently stated in our monthly newsletter:

Without a style guide, developers can end up playing a game of ‘Guess What the Client Wants.’ And trust me, that game never ends well.

Improved Brand Recognition

Consistent use of branding elements, such as logos, colors, and typography, as outlined in the style guide, helps strengthen brand recognition. When consumers encounter materials that consistently reflect the brand’s identity, they are more likely to remember and engage with it, ultimately contributing to its overall success and growth.

What a Style Guide Is Not

Now that you understand the importance of having a style guide for your WordPress website and your marketing strategy let’s go over what a style guide is not. You might be under the impression the following pieces qualify as a style guide, but they do not. Whether working with your internal team or an outside WordPress development vendor, the following items do not constitute a style guide and will not be helpful:

• Verbal Descriptions: While helpful for conveying ideas, verbal descriptions can be subjective and open to interpretation, leading to inconsistencies in style.
• Mockups: Mockups are visualizations of a design concept, not a set of rules for applying styles across different elements.
• Previous Design Samples: Previous design samples might not be relevant to the current project’s specific goals or target audience.
• Mood Boards: Mood boards establish a general aesthetic direction but lack the specifics needed to ensure consistent stylistic choices throughout a marketing project and your WordPress website.
• Someone Else’s Designs: Your brand is distinctive, so your style guide should also be unique. Designs from another source might not align with your brand identity or resonate with your target audience. They also do not convey your specific standards and brand identity to your internal design team or WordPress agency partner.

Style Guide Checklist

A well-defined style guide is your secret weapon for marketing and WordPress website consistency. It empowers designers and developers with clear direction, saving time and getting everyone on the same page. This translates to high-quality, consistent marketing and content strategies that effectively deliver your brand’s message and values. Keep reading for the elements to include in your style guide.

Brand Identity

Nail down your mission, vision, values, and brand personality. Doing so helps guide every strategy and design choice you make.

Logo Usage

Provide guidelines for logo usage. Include size, spacing, placement, and acceptable variations. Specify when and how the logo should be used in different contexts, such as digital display versus tangible sales collateral.

Color Palette

Establish your brand’s color palette. Define primary, secondary, and accent colors with hex or RGB codes for use across all digital and print materials. Consistency is crucial.

Typography

Define the primary and secondary typefaces for headings, body text, and other elements. Specify font sizes, line heights, and styles (e.g., bold, italic) for different contexts.

Imagery Guidelines

Outline guidelines for using photography, illustrations, icons, and other visual elements. Specify preferred styles, image sources, and any brand-specific imagery requirements.

UI/UX Design

Provide guidelines for user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design, including layout principles, navigation patterns, and interactive elements. Specify design patterns, button styles, form fields, and other UI components.

Accessibility

Include guidelines for designing accessible content and interfaces, following web accessibility standards (e.g., WCAG). Provide recommendations for ensuring readability, usability, and inclusivity for all users.

Print and Digital Guidelines

Differentiate guidelines for print materials (e.g., letterheads, business cards, brochures) and digital assets (e.g., websites, social media graphics, email templates). Specify dimensions, file formats, and printing requirements.

Need a WordPress Website Now, But Don’t Have a Style Guide?

No style guide? No worries. At WebDevStudios, we build custom style guides for clients needing our help with WordPress design and development but who don’t have a style guide. Contact us, and let’s chat about your new style guide and website.

The post The Importance of Having a Style Guide for Your WordPress Website appeared first on WebDevStudios.

The Basics

Every company should have a style guide. If you don’t, get on that. Within your company, you need to regulate your brand’s outward appearance, but you should also set the guidelines for external companies to use your brand properly. Even more importantly, you need to have a style guide for incoming and existing users and customers alike. Brand recognition is what drives sales and spreads your content around the web and material world.

All brand guidelines should include, at a very basic level, your brand colors, proper use of your logo, icons and images. It should also include any typography or fonts utilized by your company for web and printed materials. These can be as broad or as micro and specific as you would like. But the rule of thumb is the more specific the better, and the few outliers or one-off situations you may have can be resolved when the time comes.

I typically see two types of style guides, although they share many of the same parts. These are print and web style guides. A print style guide will include guidelines specific to the use of logos, colors, type, etc. for print media, billboards, pamphlets, business cards, and other print collateral. A web style guide will be presented the same, but the guidelines are specific to the web. This is because web and print are treated differently in units of measure, how colors are utilized, resolution, etc.

Always take both your print and online presence into consideration. Colors and fonts usually won’t look the same on digital devices as they do on printed materials.

Your Content

The design and execution of your website hold weight, but the content on your website carries more weight in order to properly communicate your brand. The message that you spread to your users or customers needs to be consistent and work to improve and strengthen your company or product image. When people say that something is “on brand,” this is what they’re referring to.

If your content works against your brand or could potentially hurt your appeal in the eyes of your users or just doesn’t apply to your mission, it’s off brand. Users expect consistent content that is fresh or new and information from your company that reflects progress and forward momentum. I’m not talking about tweets or Instagram posts, but blogs, advertisements, reviews, testimonials, or any other content-driven brand exposure.

Keeping in mind that your content reflects your brand accurately, the design that accompanies it and delivery should also be in line with all of your basic design principles. Content is what keeps people around, but the design is what keeps your brand in the zeitgeist, which is especially marked in the world outside your website in places like social media.

Social Media

Social media is a full-time job. It might not seem that way to someone not directly involved with internet communities, but it requires a lot of precision and dedication to grow your online presence and retain interest effectively.

Knowing what to post is less critical than knowing who you’re posting for and why you’re on the particular platform to begin with. Your brand is your brand and that won’t change, but the way you advertise to the public will be based on who you’re targeting. Facebook, for instance, is primarily comprised of women between the ages of 30-49 years, which has drastically shifted older in the last decade. So your strategy will need to accommodate that generation and group.

Twitter’s largest demographic are Millennials, who need a different marketing strategy and perhaps a different brand approach. To skew even lower, if you were to feel the need to advertise on Snapchat, you might find that you need to adjust even more, as their primary demographic is under 34 years of age with the vast majority being 18-24 years of age. Needless to say, you can’t expect the same strategy, content, or brand expression to affect every demographic in the same way.

Do your research and keep in mind that social media is targeted.

Imagery

Imagery is, of course, a must. With the attention of most users being under seconds on average, imagery is a requirement to get a user’s attention and keep it long enough for your content to take hold. There are now dozens of free stock photography websites out there like StockSnap, Pexels, and Unsplash which can help provide a sense of consistent imagery on your website, but I’m inclined to recommend that these be avoided for the sake of your brand.

If your brand is reliant on some sort of imagery, that should be something handled within your company by hiring a professional photographer with a consistent photographic aesthetic. Your brand identity is what makes you memorable, but for general brand aesthetic (business, lifestyle, fun, serious, etc.), your imagery says a lot. That translates over to places like Instagram, if your company utilizes the platform. Consistency and quality are key to providing a great experience for your consumer that informs the content and extends your brand aesthetic.

Clarity

Is your brand then, after taking into consideration your brand guidelines, target demographics, and brand aesthetic, accurately represented on your website? If not, contact us.

The goal to a consistent brand is really having your guidelines set in stone. There should be no wiggle room when your company’s reputation is on the line. Content, imagery, and social media help strengthen your brand aesthetic, memorability, and recognition only as much as your identity is managed properly. If you take only one thing away from this post, it should be that your brand’s style guide is a requirement for successful long-term branding.

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Canva Highlights

• It’s economical. With the Canva for Work pro account, you will have access to over 300,000 free photos, illustrations, and templates. You also get access to millions of photos for just $1. Finding quality images is hard and can be expensive. This alone can save your projects time and money.
• It does the heavy lifting for you. You can magically resize designs, which ensures you are always using the right dimensions for projects or media outlets.
• It expands beyond digital. Also, you can download your designs to send to a local print shop or any online printing service. With Canva, you can export your design as a PDF at 300 dpi. Note, though, that you will have to make sure any images or assets you add to your design are high resolution.

Here are some tips to get you started with using Canva.

1. Set Up a Canva for Work Account

There are a couple of ways to set this up. If you want to manage those design assets, you can create new accounts for each brand under your main account. Keep in mind, every new account has its own monthly or annual subscription cost.

2. Set Up the Brand

This is my favorite part. With the Canva for Work account, you can upload custom fonts from a style guide. So, if you used a really cool font in the logo, you can upload that to Canva so that font can be utilized on other assets. You can also specify what fonts should be used as the heading, sub-heading or body text.

Next, you can set the color palette. Take all of the colors from the brand’s style guide and add them to Canva so they can be easily used.  It there are other designers or team members helping to manage the brand, this will ensure no one uses the wrong color on a graphic and that the brand’s look stays consistent.

Finally, upload logos. Here, I like to upload every possible version of the logo in all of its colors. Also, of course, make sure to upload the PNG versions with no background.

Now when you start a new project, the fonts, colors, and logos will be readily available for you to use.

3. Create Templates

Templates are great for the design-challenged. This powerful tool allows you to create a large variety of branded assets that can be reused and customized. Typically, your designer files aren’t editable by anyone unless they also have Adobe or some other expensive designer software. Now, you can empower anyone on your team to quickly create design assets that perfectly match the brand.

Canva editor is a really powerful tool. It has layering capabilities so you can easily create custom designs in Photoshop and add it to Canva in layers. Canva even allows you to have placeholder images so say if your template has an image with a filter, you can easily drop in a new image and retain any filters and text that are on top of that image.

Below is a quick screen grab of all of the different template options you will have at your disposal. Remember, once you add the brand’s colors, logos, and fonts, the templates will automatically incorporate those for you. So you can feel confident that whatever you create, it is in alignment with your beautiful brand. For more information on this tool, visit the Canva website.

The post Using Canva for Your Website Projects appeared first on WebDevStudios.

You can think of Style Guides in the same light as the more traditional Brand Guidelines. In fact, they will normally include at least baseline information from the Brand Guidelines themselves (as long as the organization actually has some branding information). Where the two diverge are that Brand Guidelines normally only include which fonts should be used, basic color palettes, and logo usage. Style Guides, on the other hand, go far more in depth.

Take a look at a section of the WordPress Brand Guidelines for an example, and compare that with the screenshot from a Style Guide we built for one of our clients.

Brand Guidelines provide good information and help to ensure brand consistency across different mediums, but when it comes to actually building a product like a website or app, it leaves a lot of room to the imagination—a little too much room.

Style Guides go beyond basic color, font, and logo usage to provide a very detailed road map of how commonly used website elements should look and be used, such as buttons, form inputs, navigation systems, headings, body text, etc.

Another great thing about Style Guides is that they help us create a visual language for your product. Take a look at the screenshot below where the two sections have different icon styles, fonts, and typography. It’s not a huge difference, but it’s enough to make the page look unprofessional. Now, multiply that across 40-60 pages and multiple sites and you have a pretty big problem on your hands. This is especially true if your goal is to position yourself as a professional and trustworthy business (remember, people are wary of poorly designed websites).

Style Guides are normally created in whatever design program the rest of the product is built with, such as Sketch or Photoshop. They can also be converted to code and used to rapidly piece together new pages of the site without even creating full mock-ups. There’s a great post on our blog about the difference between Style Guides and Pattern Libraries, which goes into more detail about using code-based Style Guides (Pattern Libraries).

Later, we’ll touch on how you can harness the power of these Pattern Libraries without investing the time and money into building a full-fledged Library.

Now that we know what a Style Guide is, let’s talk about why your organization needs one and how you can save time and money by employing them.

Why your company needs a Style Guide

Style Guides offer two incredible benefits to your organization—the ability to create a consistent look and feel throughout the site, and a tool which affords designers and developers with a way to easily and quickly create new pages for your website or app.

Let’s dig into these two benefits.

Quickly Create New Pages and Features

At WebDevStudios, we provide each of our clients with a complete Style Guide. Some of them have even said they use them internally to make sure print materials, internal documents, etc. all have a consistent look. Most of our clients will take advantage of the Style Guide in the browser.

We provide clients with a robust and modular “blocks” based system for building out new pages of their website. You can think of it like a Page Builder, but much more user-friendly and with far superior performance (Page Builders can often produce nasty code and slow your site down).

This system allows clients to piece together a new page for the website in no time at all, without having to focus on the design of these elements (remember, the blocks come straight from the Style Guide). Now, instead of having IT code a new page, or hiring an agency for a one-off job, clients can easily build them out within minutes.

Visual Consistency

Imagine if large companies such as Microsoft and Apple didn’t employ Style Guides across their various digital properties. They may have several in-house and outsourced teams that work to create new designs for them, each bringing their own “style” with them. The Style Guide forces these teams to work within a set of constraints to ensure each page has the same baseline styles.

But won’t Style guides make every page look templated and boring?

At first glance, you may think style guides are essentially Lego blocks for constructing new pages, which may create a boring experience. And while they do afford us with a modular system for picking various pre-made blocks of styles (like Legos), this doesn’t necessarily mean every page will or should look the same. It’s just like how a “Star Wars” Lego set looks a lot different than the “Jurassic Park” set.

There are definitely times when you will be able to simply pick pieces from the Style Guide and assemble a new page, and that’s one of the benefits. But there will always be certain pages of your site that are more important and will require art direction and dedicated mock-ups. Think your homepage, the product page, careers page, etc. With these pages, you want to tell a story and really engage with users on a deep level. That can certainly be accomplished with the Style Guide, and chances are, you’ll still use many pieces of it, but these are the pages where you can truly provide a unique design (while staying within the bounds of the Style Guide).

A good example of innovation through a set of constraints can be found in Jazz. In 1959, Miles Davis gathered several of the best Jazz musicians together into a tiny studio to record the innovative record Kind of Blue. The way Jazz was played at the time was very sporadic, with notes flying up and down the entire musical scale. We know it as “bebop.”

Davis wanted a new approach for this record and instead had the musicians play within a set of constraints–only a few scales and modes–a small box on the guitar neck instead of the entire neck. The resulting record would change the way Jazz was played forever and is largely considered a masterpiece.

When we stop thinking of constraints as limiting and look at them as a tool to innovate with, Style Guides can help us accomplish some pretty cool things.

Go get your style on!

So hopefully by this point, you have a good understanding of the benefits Style Guides can bring to your organization and are ready to get started on your very own. If you’d like some examples of more great Style Guides online, I’ve created a brief list of some of my favorites:

• U.S. Web Standards
• Mailchimp Pattern Library
• Lonely Planet Style Guide

Let us know in the comments if you have any great examples of Style Guides you’re a fan of or any other tips you use to ensure visual consistency in your projects.

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