A personal question about your website

Peter Crocker In my web browser, I have a folder called ‘business websites I like’. It contains random sites that, for one reason or another, drew me in. Looking back through them, they have three ingredients in common.

These are: clarity, intelligence and personality.

Spending time on a great website is like listening to an engaging speaker. You can tell they know their stuff and talk about it in a way you understand. You’ve never met, but feel as if you know them.

For example, here are a couple of copy snippets from sites on my list.

Kell & Rigby: “We’re builders. That’s about as complicated as it gets. We have a simple vision: to be widely known as Australia’s best builder. We’re passionate about doing things right the first time.”

Idea Shop: “Idea Shop is a full-service advertising and graphic design agency. Everybody says that, so we thought we should too. In reality, every agency has its strong points. Here are the things that we excel at - maybe we'll be a good match for your company.”

IT Partners: “A leading law firm was pleased to find an IT support company that didn't lose interest once the deal was done.”

Freshview Software: “Tens of thousands of companies use our software every day to become heroes, cure headaches, start revolutions, blow socks off and even fall in love!”

My Emma: “We think it should be easy to use (goodbye, cluttered interface). It should be made for you (farewell, generic templates). And it should even be fun (see ya around, support phone queue).”

Getting more personality into your own website is not necessarily as hard at might sound.

Try this experiment. Read your website aloud as if you were explaining to a friend what you do. Does it sound natural? Are you cringing? Would your friend be wondering where the ‘real’ you went?

Next, strip out the corporate speak and impersonal language and boil your message down into plain English. You’ll know it’s right when you can read it out loud comfortably.

In the comments, I’ve listed links to the five sites with personality. It would be great if you could list your favourite business websites (other than your own!) so we can all use them for inspiration.

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Until next week.

Love your work,

Peter Crocker is a director of Flying Solo responsible for the areas of marketing and advertising. He is a business copywriter specialising in websites, videos and marketing communications.

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Five sites with personality...
www.kellrigby.com
www.ideashop.com
www.itpartners.co.nz
www.freshview.com
www.myemma.com
We'd love to see what websites inspire you. Peter Crocker from Flying Solo | Read my articles
Perversely, I also keep a list of sites that don't inspire. And the reason I haven't completed the site so far is because I prefer personality in a site, but I'm an accountant .....
Must move to sort out the site, I think. Thanks Peter. Denise Maffey CA from Kumeu NZ
Oh I so agree I am currently in the process of updating my company - Leading Value's website - and a great tip I got from a friend was to print out each webpage on my site and highligh all the times I said "I' or "we" or my company name and then in a different colour highlight all the times it had "you". The results were a real kick in the backside - it was all about what we could do and deliver and nothing about why our target market might benefit from our services - hardly any WIIFM. No wonder visitors didn't browse for long!
I am now in the process of a copyright overhaul and already seeing boosted visiting to the site.
Sites that inspired me - apart from Flying Solo which is a great, easy to navigate site were: http://www.vermillion.in/htmlsite/strategies.html and http://www.red-hot-copy.com/ and http://www.stopgap.com.au/ Heidi Alexandra Pollard from Warners Bay, Australia
Hello Peter,
Personality is important. And it is hard to draw the fine line between personality and unprofessional.
Like Heidi, I do like Flying Solo - you are my inspiration for many things :) Keep up the great work guys - Jess Jess from Newcastle
Is there such a thing as perfection? A website will always be 'a work in progress' and we can always learn from others. Thank you for reminding us to make sure we 'show' rather than blow our own trumpet. Carmel from Albury
Learnt more about how to design a website from the link below than any other source and yes I reckon it has a bit of personality.
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/
I think the biggest problem people have is not providing useful/helpful information on their site when relating to their specialty.
Yes, yes theres the standard 5 pages of what we want to sell you and then 2 pages of mission statements and why we are the best but no information the the reader will find useful.
The Yellow pages syndrome...
Of course out of the billions of sites out there, mine is the best and has lots of useful information that I have taken the time to write myself. Adam from Adelaide

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