I talked briefly in my last article about how an important factor when adding your images to your website can be in having something that is personal to the business, or that will essentially identify the content of the photo as belonging uniquely to your business. This extends to other areas of your website as well, and I am going to get into some of these factors below.
As your website is essentially the online storefront or client-facing side of your business (potentially your only one), having the client experience on your website be uniquely “you” is extremely important. If you are Best Buy, how do you make your user experience different from let’s say Amazon, while still keeping the quality of the user experience as high? This is a bit of a rhetorical question, but the answer comes in tweaking UI and layouts without sacrificing any actual functionality versus their competitors. This could be something as simple from a UI perspective as increasing the size on a slider button for price range, or allowing the user to type in a physical number in addition to the slider. Generally speaking, colour and “branding” are the first things to be applied for personalization, but you may find other aspects of your business personality that you can apply to your website.
Language is another huge aspect of personalization that should be mentioned. The language and tone you set on your website needs to be not only consistent throughout the pages, but consistent with the tone of your business as a whole. If you are a business with a target customer base of senior citizens, you may want to avoid using harsh or slang language for example. On the other hand, being too stuffy with a target customer base of young people, you may lose them. Keeping the tone in mind is very important for keeping the attention of your reader.
Advertising your website through the proper and appropriate channels is another aspect of personalization. You need to put yourself out there, but only in the circles that will care to look at your site in the first place. Advertising on Facebook tends to be more successful for local business versus Twitter, for example.
