Product branding seems so simple on the surface for those who are new, but once you get serious, it has deeper and more complex meaning to it.
Things to consider with branding:
- Dumb things down. For the most part, people don’t care about anything past the first page of the search engine and attention to detail when browsing products at the store.
- Make it short, sweet and simple where people are enticed enough to explore even deeper. That’s how you get return customers–in this case, site visitors.
- Consistency. Making sure that across the brand’s platforms, things correlate with each other. From fonts, colors, logos, etc. This is why professional brands have Brand Identity as reference when publishing new or updated information to ensure consistency.
- Memorable. When people think of “internet privacy”, would the first thing that come to their mind be Privacy Guides?
With that being said, I agree with the LinkedIn post and changing the UX/UI of the homepage can attract more visitors to the site.
Putting myself in the shoes of someone who doesn’t know much about technology and privacy, my first impressions of the homepage would be quite similar to companies who offer paid solutions to elevate businesses. Such as customer support solutions, front/back-end solutions, collaboration, etc. instead of a knowledge base for privacy tools that comes with a community behind it. The goal of the homepage doesn’t express the intent of the website, if that makes sense.
Having more blog posts and featuring a few of them as cards on the front page can be attractive instead of a few buttons that guide people to another page. The header links could be reduced to a maximum of 3–4 items and having the search bar in the center instead of the top right.
The website is also missing sitemaps and a proper footer. If you’d like to keep the donate link on the top, try changing it into an icon instead of letters, then add “Donate” or “Support the project” as a tooltip. The web footer can easily contain everything in the current web header, organized into separate tables accordingly, if needed.