About a year ago when I restructured my online interests into a business (Apricot Media), one of the first things I set out to do was to take my existing websites/blogs and attempt to build them into mini networks or clusters of websites that could refer relevant traffic internally and then develop a brand between them.
Although WordPress Hacks is not my primary website, I have built a mini-network of websites within the WordPress niche and used branding to create user recognition. If you look here at WP Hacks, WordPress eBook, WordPress Forums, and our WordPress Directory, you’ll see they all use blue and all use a very similar logo. Over time people will associate a logo with your websites and eventually with you individually, which is the ultimate goal. This will also drastically lower costs if you hire a designer, or save you time if you design things yourself.
If you’d like to see some very strong examples of internet blog brands built, check out this post over at Got Chance. You’ll see Apricot Media featured there among some pretty elite company!
So, how does this all tie to WordPress? I believe most, if not all of the sites mentioned, are built using WordPress. Once you’ve built a completely custom theme you are happy with, you can easily install that theme on any number of other WordPress blogs and make the proper customizations (change the colors, adjust the logos, etc.) to grow and expand your brand.
When you build websites, how much time do you spend focusing on branding?
Kyle Eslick
Kyle Eslick is the founder and primary author of WordPress Hacks. You can learn more about him at KyleEslick.com or you can follow his personal tweets here.
Nice, best post I found on the subject.
If you add code of a full page template using your code ...
best collection 
Does anyone have problem after updating? in my case, my Visitor map doesn't work well after updating >.< 
very nice theme, but what exactly means wp 2.7 ready? is it compatible with the newest version of wordpress? get ...
14 feature in theme looks quite interesting but yet have problem on SEO with some theme of Wordpress. 
Nicen themes, good work :) 
Companies seem to ignore the single largest online branding/advertising venue available: their own regular external emails. Why not use these emails to market the senders company?
You have a website.
You send emails.
Why not multiply your sales-staff by “wrapping” the regular email in an interactive letterhead?
No other marketing or advertising medium is as targeted as an email between people that know each other (as opposed to mass emails). These emails are always read and typically kept.
Excellent article Kyle! I agree that having a strong brand helps you in many way, and connect your websites together.
Amazing article! I use the same template over my SlackrMedia network of blogs, and has helped people come from one blog to another, and there are often similar users and commentors on both.
I design all of my websites myself, so I guess you could say my design style is part of my brand. As well, I try to make sure that my websites can connect to one another in some sort of way, to strengthen the network.