Branding and the landing page

You’ll need: Branding, Landing page — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

Your landing page is the first thing most visitors see, and almost none of it is typed into a page editor. It is assembled from two settings screens.

Branding: the things that appear everywhere

Branding holds your name, your logo, your brand colour and your favicon — the small icon in the browser tab.

These are not decoration limited to one page. The brand colour reaches your public pages and your printed documents; the logo appears in the header, the footer and, where a record has no picture of its own, in the space a picture would have filled. Setting them properly once saves fixing them in a dozen places later.

A note on the colour: pick something with enough contrast to carry white or black text, because FeePrime chooses the text colour against it automatically. A mid-tone with poor contrast makes captions hard to read everywhere at once.

The landing page: the things that appear once

The landing page settings hold the words.

Tagline — one line under your name. Value proposition — the short pitch under the tagline. About, mission and vision — longer text for visitors who scroll. Hero photo and hero panel — the picture at the top. And a layout style, which is the next section, because it is the biggest single decision on this screen.

   +--------------------------------------+
   |  logo            nav      [ member ] |   <- branding
   +--------------------------------------+
   |                                      |
   |   Your business name                 |   <- branding
   |   Tagline                            |   <- landing page
   |   Value proposition                  |   <- landing page
   |   [ hero photo ]                     |   <- landing page
   +--------------------------------------+
   |  About · mission · vision            |   <- landing page
   +--------------------------------------+

Layout style: what your front page is for

Layout style changes the shape of your front page — not its colours, which is branding’s job. Pick it by asking what you want a first-time visitor to do in their first ten seconds.

Simple is the default. A straightforward landing page. Good when your site exists mainly so people can find you, check you are real, and get your phone number.

Corporate leads with About, mission and vision, then your team, then a gallery. The “who we are” shape — right for a firm whose visitors are deciding whether to trust you: consultancies, agencies, professional practices, associations.

News puts a compact hero above your published lists, so recent posts sit high on the page. Choose it when the reason to come back is that there is something new — a publication, a church, an association that posts regularly.

E-Commerce leads with offers and your best-ranked products, and adds a cart, category filters and search. For businesses whose front page should be a shopfront.

Real Estate is the most drastic: your front page becomes the property listing. Not a page with properties on it — literally the same page as your properties list, at your root address. Right when browsing stock is the only thing visitors come for.

Shorts is a full-screen vertical feed, swiped like a phone app, with no conventional top bar. Striking, and narrow: it suits a business whose content is mostly visual and mostly consumed on a phone. It is the one to try on staging before committing.

Custom HTML hands rendering to a template you own. Lesson 9 covers what that costs.

   what should a visitor do first?
   ------------------------------------------
   find you, then call      ->  Simple
   decide whether to trust  ->  Corporate
   see what is new          ->  News
   buy something            ->  E-Commerce
   browse property          ->  Real Estate
   scroll something visual  ->  Shorts

Three things that surprise people

It mostly changes the front page only. Your services, updates and other inner pages keep the standard theme whichever style you choose. The exceptions are Real Estate, which replaces the front page wholesale, and Custom HTML, which replaces everything.

Your shop is always there. The /shop address renders the shopfront regardless of your layout style. Choosing E-Commerce does not switch the shop on, and choosing something else does not switch it off — it only decides whether the shopfront is also your front page.

Custom HTML needs two settings, not one. Set the layout style to Custom and select the template. Set only the layout style and there is nothing to render with, so you fall back to the built-in theme and it looks as though the setting did not save. Nearly everyone who reports “custom templates don’t work” has set one of the two.

Which screen controls what

This is the single most common source of “I cannot find where to change that”. Roughly: if it appears on every page, it is branding. If it appears only on the front page, it is the landing page settings.

Logo in the header on every page — branding. The sentence under your name on the front page — landing page. Colour of the buttons throughout — branding.

Write the tagline for a stranger

The tagline is read by people who do not yet know what you do. “Excellence and integrity since 2009” tells them nothing. “Building supplies and delivery across Douala” tells them everything, and it is the difference between a visitor staying and leaving.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, set a brand colour and a tagline, then look at your public front page and one inner page. Notice which of the two changes followed you onto the inner page. That is the branding-versus-landing distinction, learned in one go.