Website Personality - What Does Your Homepage Say About You?

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All communication is filtered through personality. And, (as you may have noticed in your interpersonal relationships) is what determines how you perceive others; even how you perceive their perceptions; how you react to others, and they you.

Your website visitors are clearly not going to check their personality at your homepage. If anything else, when searching for products and services, users' personalities will emerge all the more - a purchase is a 'big deal.' Online buyers make emotionally based purchases justified by logic only after the sale. To be successful online you have to focus on your visitors, not yourself.

Things like look and feel, tone and manner, narrative, emotional flare, etc, are few factors that convey your website personality and appeal to the personalities of your visitors. Basic design and structural elements are equally as important. Does your homepage copy begin with "Welcome to our website. We are super awesome, and if you will have a look around, you will surely agree with us...." What does this convey? To be frank, it conveys ego-centricity, lack of concern for your customer and how you can solve their problem.

Let's take a look at a few other website traits and personality translations:

• Characteristic: Website Copy: It takes longer than 4 seconds for my visitors to understand what my site is about.
  • Message: "We don't know how to express ourselves," (or worse) "There's not much of value here to be expressed."
    
• Characteristic: Code: It takes longer than 4 seconds for my pages to load
  • Message: "You will wait."
    
• Characteristic: Layout / Design: I have unnecessary design elements and images that detract from my important copy, and the focal point of my homepage.
  • Message: "My marketing tools are incongruent with my business model, and I don't know how to tell you I can help you."

A more positive outlook and approach to take is simply, "focus on your visitor." Your business exists to provide a product or service that solves a problem and fulfills a need. How can you convey this message? How can you convey that you CARE enough to think about HOW you convey it?

Example: Your visitors are engineers. This most likely means want to be 'spoken to' in a clear, concise, straightforward manner. They want to know product specifications, and they want to find them quickly: An obvious focal point on the home page that conveys what the site is about. They need an overly organized, intuitive, and prominently placed navigation structure, and product focused copy. A collage of 'industrial related' images wont do much except detract from your message.

Another example: You're a female online marketer. Are you going to exploit your sexuality to differentiate yourself? Play up your femininity to appeal to female prospects? Check out my website. What's my personality?

Remember that in order to convey your website personality, you must first define it. Doing so makes you easy to do business with!

Megan Carruth is an online marketing and business development consultant who has been helping grow small businesses with innovative web strategies since 2005. With an emphasis on ethics and value, Megan founded BizDevMarketing with the vision of empowering business owners with a winning combination of online marketing knowledge and self-sufficiency. Her primary areas of expertise include search engine marketing, social media, content development, blog promotion  and strategic alliances. A musician, she performs with various groups in the Minneapolis /St.Paul area and spends most of her free time reading about topics such as cosmology, alternative medicine and spirituality.

"Helping small businesses make their mark online."
Online Marketing & Business Development Consultant, BizDev Marketing
651.808.0758