Step 1: Personas

Building your perfect website is a lot like building a house. You need a good set of plans or you’re going to end up with a dysfunctional collection of materials that costs about the same as the house done right, but it’s unfit for anything practical. You need a set of plans.

When building a website there are a number of activities utilized to “draw those blueprints”, one of which is creating your personas.

You create a persona much like the FBI might profile someone, and for similar reasons! Every aspect of their life, their personality, emotions, social interactions, demographics, psychographics and online behavioral tendencies are taken into account in order to develop “scent trails” and improve conversion rates.

Scent Trails

Your website visitors move around your website much like people might hunt for an animal. They typically begin at a central point and fan out from there. As long as the scent trail remains evident the hunter proceeds down the path. But if that scent is ever lost the first thing the hunter and his dogs will do is back-track the path towards the original point of origin, until the scent is recovered, then attempt to follow it even if it leads off in another direction.

We do something very similar in the constrction of your website. From the developed personas we take our clues as to what your targeted personalities will respond to and incorporate that in an overall site map–a wireframe as they’re called and in the various content elements. The goal is to lead the visitor from his original landing point to the conversion event in as few steps as possible, making it as simple as possible for him to follow the scent trail.

Copyright © 2006-2008 Phillip Crum | Email This Page Email This Page | JobSearchDocs