What is a house style?
As soon as you start a business, you are confronted with a variety of concepts and terms, corporate identity is one of them. In this blog we want to discuss what exactly this can mean and how you can design and set this up on your website.
Starting a business means taking on a lot of responsibilities, not only to get your first customers, but also to set up a long list of rules and be legally correct. The relatively easy part is to create a website and take the first steps to offer your services or products on it. This is where the house style soon comes into play, let's start with what you can use for it!
Corporate identity on a website
By house style on a website, we mean the font you use on a website. What media appears on the website, what colors are used, and what the design of your pages looks like. Many themes or templates that can be installed with a website often have a default design already set up for this purpose. These can then be easily customized to suit your needs. Content management systems such as WordPress and Joomla make this process much easier. These content management systems are easy to install at MijnHostingPartner.nl and are great to host with our Total SSD hosting package. For a low annual price, you'll then have everything ready to get started with your business website.
If you take a few hours to customize WordPress, you can achieve an almost unique result with all your customizations, as you can see below, for example. So you can make customizations for almost every element of your website:
You can also leave this as default and call it your house style, which is often enough for many first drafts with a website. Then, simply choose a theme that best suits your needs. If you want to learn more about the many free WordPress themes, take a look at our previous blog posts. Here, we'll take a closer look at what they're all about.
House style in the post
To better appeal to your customers and potential customers, it's best to use the same style in all your mails. After all, this looks more professional. So, take advantage of the unlimited mail addresses in your package and use your own domain name for emailing. Instead of using a free provider like a Gmail or Outlook address. Also, within your email, you can customize the font to match your website and end each email with a personal signature. Include your role in the company, your contact information, and a link to your website. It is also possible to insert your logo or photo to give your emails a more personal touch.
These settings can be found in our webmail or in the program you use for email management. Many of these settings can be done in one place. You should not have to set them individually for each mailing.
In general, it is advisable to work with your mail address from one place, and therefore choose either our webmail or a fixed program. And use the email on the phone only to keep track of your inbox and shorter mails. With a physical keyboard and your house style within your mail program, it's just easier to keep track of it than on a smaller phone screen.
Apply house style in your bills
For your invoices, it's important to establish and use a set look and feel, whether you still create each invoice manually or use an accounting package to do so. Give your invoices a serious look by including your logo and other company style. Again, use the same font as in the email and on the website.
Office buildings, stationery and other offline printouts of these.
After you've designed your logo and corporate identity, it's important to apply that to other expressions of your business. Think about creating a standard letterhead that shows off your logo well and hangs in your business. And having other offline expressions ready for it. Like a nice business card that you can hand out when meeting with potential clients or partners. Especially at conferences and other meetings within your sector, this is still a coveted and much used item. Writing your website and contact details on a piece of paper is of course not very professional if you have just met a nice contact.
Have you found your corporate identity yet? Share a screenshot on social media!
