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Branding Tutorial
Often times when you are writing a page, you have to conform to a set of standards for uniform appearance.
As innovative and avante garde as the web is, there are times when conformity is a good thing, particularly
when you are trying to tie a site into a unifying theme, such as when you are working on a corporation's
site. The TUCOWS Network is an example of a such a site. Once we
finish converting all of our sites, we will have a unified look and feel, yet each site will still have
it's own style.
The buzzword for this is 'branding.' It is a pretty accurate term, in essence you are applying your mark
to a 'herd' of pages to let everyone know that it is yours. (We find this particularly ironic in the case
of The TUCOWS Network, branding the cows.)
Depending on whether you are working for someone else of developing sites on your own, the amount and type
of branding you do will vary. Often times while working for someone else, their ideas on what is a proper
amount of branding will differ from yours. Everyone will have a different opinion.
When done properly, branding will convey a sense of unity among the different pages on a site, or even
spanning a series of sites. This will help your users know they are on a similar site, and advise them of
the other sites under your branding umbrella, sites they previously may not have known were a part of the
larger company.
When done wrong, branding can have a detrimental effect. People will not be able to tell what page they
are on. Everything looks exactly like everything else. Are you in their news section? Are you in their
software section? Maybe you're in their HTML section. There is no way of telling. We're sure you've seen
sites like this, giant soulless compilations of HTML code, all sanitized for your consumption.
With a little thought and some extra work, you can make your individual sites stand out like all the
courses of a full banquet, rather than seem like yet another scoop of unseasoned oatmeal.
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