How to create a "Website with Personality"
How do you put personality into essentially a set of computer files, made up of pixels and lines of code? Without risking the risk of the ROBOTS who take over our jobs and kill us all?
Risky or not, it’s necessary. When people visit your website ,we want them to feel something.
And those feelings should be positive – so NOT bored, annoyed, irritated.
Certainly, we don’t want them noticing any mistakes or glitches – so proper testing and quality control is a must (had to add this in here as sadly with the state of the digital world, there are some major messes to be cleaning up!
The feelings we want to get them to feel are ones of connection, trust, and that we’re letting them into our world a little bit. We work with our clients on helping them reveal safely, without oversharing. Showing their people in a positive light. Writing in an approachable style. Showing clearly how well they understand their target clients. Making those target market people feel like they’re at home. All through the website.
All this means that the website is there to create awareness and opportunity as well as inform and make the right impression. It’s amazing what you can do with a website!
To encourage you to get to know the personalities in the lovely TLD team, we have a lovely PDF called “5 ways to show personality in a website” and we’re just so eager to send it to you – just ask! Or if you prefer and your personality is not too shy, just comment below if you can guess what some of these are!
5 ways to show personality in a website
Case Studies:
Write stories about your successes and most interesting projects – and give more detail on the human factor. Start with how you got to know your client, who worked on the project, how they felt, the obstacles that they had to overcome. Write it as a real human story!
Testimonials: Get your clients to answer some leading questions so the real juicy bits are revealed. Without getting over dramatic, we’re looking for testimonials that show that life before you was TERRIBLE and life with you solved their problems in a transformational way!
Pictures: Stop cutting corners and get those professional photos taken, guys! As usual we highly recommend our favourite photographer Nada who works with most of our clients. It’s the most fantastic way to spend your money and it’s perfectly priced to suit small businesses. In this day and age, iPhone pictures and pictures taken by your mates are barely suitable for passport photos. For your website, your speaker bio, your LinkedIn page – you definilely need professional photos. People can tell the difference!
Feature the team: For many small businesses, the biggest differentiator between them and their nearest competitors is the team. We’re all unique, and while the leader of the business is usually the driving force behind the company culture – and for the most part it helps if the leader is visible in all the many ways online. However, going beyond this, have a good look at each individual and think of ways their unique contribution to your business and your customers can be highlighted more through articles, the social media and in the bios on the team section. For example: If you’re mentioning a project, link to the bio pages of key team members who worked on that project. If you’re talking about a service, link to a blog article written by a member of the team answering common questions about that service.
Tone of voice: The text on your website is important, and should reflect your company’s brand. While online writing at it’s best concise and snappy (so people’s eyes aren’t tired, and because we’ve established the short attention span of online writing!), other factors such as how casual you write, how much information you include, and what type of vocabulary you use, are all down to who you’re writing for. Personality will come into force especially on team bios, which should be consistent in the tone of voice and, in addition, allow people to know a bit more about your team. Your writer should aim to include personality driven elements such as values, beliefs, and what makes them great at their jobs. These are the pages that come up when people Google someone’s name, so it’s worth focusing on!
For example, Children’s books series The Tower Bridge Cat uses the personality of the books main star, Bella the cat, to give the website a nice personality.