Do you know who you are?

One of the biggest stumbling blocks in an online business is its identity.  How does your online presence conform to your real world store front?  When you look at your web site, do the graphics (logo, header, and colors) match up with your printed matter? (Business cards, postcards, tri-fold brochures)  Does your e-mail reflect the same?  Can any Joe/Jane customer take one look at your site and see your company as a partner in solving his/her problem?  Do any of these questions ring a bell?

We will look at each of these questions, and how to work with them in the next few sections of this article.

Are your graphics killing your business?

This seems like a no brainer here doesn’t it?  You have graphics on your site. Yup, their there all right.  Sitting there looking all snazzy, but are they doing their job? Their job is to help your customer navigate your site; give you some flavor of the company that put it there, and to bring some color to the content of the site.

1) Navigation:  Nice looking roll-over images are great to look at.  Make sure your designer is using a lot of code to produce the effect, as this tends to weigh down the sites load times.  There are great ways of doing roll-overs in CSS that will be light weight code wise and look awesome as well.

2) Flavor: A good designer can utilize your existing graphics to help conform your online identity to your store front, not detract from it.  Have you ever gone to a site that looks good, but nothing like the newspaper ads you have seen, or the T.V. spot?  You have to wonder if it’s the same company at all.  If your store front is red, white, and blue, make your website red, white, and blue to match.  Let your customers KNOW that they are on the right site.

3) Color: This is to mean not just the layout colors from the last point, but images.  Getting some images of your product in the customers face, without slowing down the browsing experience.  This can be a trick sometimes.  Most people think “I’ll just put a gallery page up” In some cases this is a grand idea.  (I don’t think a proctologist website is a good place for a gallery myself) Placing related images, such as the doctors image in his Bio, or some of the staff behind the counter, can bring more comfort to the customer when they know who they will be dealing with when they go into the office.

These are a couple of things to look at when thinking of redoing your web site, or redoing your business plan.  Just remember the biggest question out there…

WHO ARE YOU?

Author: Shannon Smith JH Studios