Dibbern Key #7 Identify yourself and
reflect your business personality - your persona
Clearly identify yourself:
If you are a small business trying to get people to buy from you on the
web, plan a new web page or remodel a web page and call it anything like "About
us", "Who we are", or Contact us" or just use the familiar
name* of your business in you nav bar link to the following information:.
Include all the contact information a person could ever ask for, PLUS Any
special buying information or directions, PLUS something about the owners
if possible: how long you have been in business, if it is over a year and
why you are operating this business. Here's an example using our
fishmarket business keyword sample, "I've always loved the smell
of really fresh fish and I wanted to share that joy with other people."
The better the web viewer knows you, the more comfortable they will be in
buying from you.
Make 3 separate short paragraph sections on this page - each about one paragraph
-contact information, about the business and you.
You are trying to instill trust and legitimacy that you will come through
with your claims about your product/service/place etc.
Don't blast your logo across the screen.
It is only there to identify you and your site and for that reason it must
be on your website - on every page. But get past it! Focus
more on the information you should deliver through you website and how you
can say it or show it to entice your market! We know you are proud of your
business, so include everything you want people to know about you in a special
page mentioned above- a better way to consider your business identity.
Reflecting your business personality or business
identity: your website persona or corporate identity
The "look" or design
of your website should reflect either:
1. Your business personality - your persona (or, just like what the big corporations
do to create their corporate images)
You should give the same impression to visitors to your website as would meeting
you in person. Are you casual or sophisticated? Are you very friendly or prefer
what may be considered the business-to-business approach? Are you charming
and country, or a city slicker? Are you selling highly tehnical, or emotionally?
If you want to be perceived as professional, then your website must be professional
in appearance- which does not mean "cold" or impersonal necessarily,
but does mean organized well and contain the information your web visitors
seek, plus have a good navigation system.
2. Your market's personality.
Are the people you sell to casual or sophisticated? Are they spirited or youthful?
Are they down-home people or suits? Do they want the technical points or will
they buy based on what they feel they will get from you? The appearance of
your site, the way it functions, and the content all need to be presented
properly in target marketing.
Hopefully your own business personality and your market's
personality are both the same or quite similar , but that isn't always true.
Check out our section on marketing - if you had to choose, choose to make
your website match your market. If you don't know who your market is, find
out using the link in this paragraph.
Empathy is emotional or intellectual identification
with another person. Your website must "sell" its products and or
services in empathy with the people most likely to buy from you. One way to
accomplish this is through your own "Corporate identity" or persona.
Major corporations spend thousands of dollars to establish their corporate
image - their persona, because they know how important it is to relate
properly to their customers. Any small business can establish its own persona
or corporate identity (even if you are not a corporation) by following our
guidelines.
Why do we integrate our name- Dibbern- in the content of our
pages? Fist you will eventually remember us, and also because unscrupulous
webmasters will grab the information from a good web page and use it as their
own!
*(really IBM started out as something like International Business
Machines so a familiar name is ok to use as long as your full business name
also appears on the page in text)
