Once you have your Branana brand, you already have many of the decisions you need to start building a website. Your logo, colours, fonts and writing style give you a foundation to work from, so you don't need to design everything from scratch.
You also don't need a completely custom website to use your brand well. Website builders like Squarespace, Shopify and Webflow let you set things like colours, fonts and logos across your site, then build your pages on top of them.
Start with your Branana brand guide open beside you. Add your text logo as your main website logo, and use your logo symbol for smaller spaces like your favicon where needed. Copy the HEX values from your guide when setting up your site colours, then choose your headline and body fonts before you begin styling individual pages.
Your writing style is useful here too. Refer back to it when you are writing headlines, buttons, navigation, product descriptions and other website copy. It helps the words feel like they belong to the same brand as the design.
What to have ready: your text logo, logo symbol, brand colours, headline font, body font and writing style.
It is worth setting these things up across the whole website before you get too deep into individual pages. That way, when you add a new heading or button later, you can use the styles you have already created rather than making another design decision each time.
There is no single website platform that is right for every business. The best option depends on what your website needs to do and how much control you want over the design.
Squarespace is a good place to start if you want to make a polished website yourself without getting too technical. It works well for service businesses, hospitality, portfolios and other websites where the main job is to share information and help people get in touch. Its Site Styles let you manage things like fonts and colours across your website.
Learn about Squarespace Site Styles
https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/205815788-Make-style-changes-to-your-site
Shopify is designed around selling products online, so it makes sense if an online store is the main purpose of your website. You can use its theme settings to add your logo and set colours and typography across your store.
Learn about Shopify theme settings
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/themes/customizing-themes/theme-editor/theme-settings
Webflow gives you more control over how your website looks and behaves. It can be a good choice if you are comfortable designing websites yourself or if you are handing your Branana brand to a designer or developer. Webflow variables can be used to save things like brand colours and fonts so they can be reused throughout the site.
Learn about Webflow variables
https://help.webflow.com/hc/en-us/articles/33961268146323-Variables
Your Branana brand guide gives you the ingredients for your website, but it is not a website template. You still get to decide how your pages are laid out, what photography you use, what information you include and how people move through the site.
That flexibility is a good thing. Your website doesn't need to look like every other website using the same font or colour. Keep coming back to the parts of the brand you have already chosen, then use them in a way that suits your business and what your customers need from the site.
