Comments on: How site personas can enhance your site

By: Matt Morse

Matt Morse — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:35:50 +0000

When putting my new portfolio site together I took on board advice from many articles that I'd read about breathing some personality into your site. As such I believe my site does carry a persona, hopefully that of a down to earth, jargon free "friend" of sorts. This was reasonably easy to do as it should basically be "me" coming through. I imagine it would be a little more tricky, although interesting, if creating a persona for someone else, be it an individual or a trade or brand. A bit like an actor getting into a new role I guess.

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 29 May 2009 23:48:58 +0000

I've had some trouble with people wrapping their heads around a persona for the their website. I think it has something to do with having to remember a website and a person--I don't feel like many people I've done personas with have been able to easily combine them.

Laely I've just been asking people if they thought of their website as a person, how would you describe it now and how you would want to describe it in the future. And do it with specific questions like private vs outgoing, conventional vs experimental, etc.

It's accomplishing a very similar thing, but doesn't require an imaginary person to remember... It's still just a website, but it's getting evaluated differently.

The only downside I've seen so far is that it seems less real and less important then a persona. A persona feels like an official document. So I just need to come up with a cool name and make people sign off on it so they give it the attention it deserves after the fact.

Anyways, I do think personas or anything similar are extremely important. The more a potential or current customer thinks of your website and/or company with human traits, the more trustworthy and memorable it becomes. Rock on Paul!

By: Dinu

Dinu — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:34:06 +0000

So is the site persona for Boagworld a cow? ;) Great post anyways....never thought of it that way before. An complementary viewpoint on branding.

By: Joshua Platt

Joshua Platt — Wed, 27 May 2009 21:25:53 +0000

I completely agree with you Paul, great post. Would you say that the site persona is an extension (or perhaps personification) of the the entities brand? It would seem to me that brand and site persona are very closely related. To put it differently, the Boagworld site persona is born out of the Boagworld brand, and the Boagworld brand is defined or supported by the site persona.

By: Ragnar Karlsson

Ragnar Karlsson — Wed, 27 May 2009 16:33:29 +0000

I'm about to enter into a large project where a site is being completely overhauled and so this is a particularly useful post for me. Working with at least 4 other contributors to the site having a site persona could well be extremely useful to unify the parts outside of the blog (where obviously different persona are important). Thanks for this, will reread later and retweet shortly.

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 27 May 2009 16:07:55 +0000

I completely agree with you Paul... in my own experience, I find that most of the sites I design/write for end up getting a little of my own "persona" whether I'm conscious of it at the time of creation or not... especially evident in the tone of any copy that I add or edit.

In lieu of a distinct persona, I find it's generally nice to just to be conversational in tone (vs. uber-formal)... but that's going to depend a lot on the type of clientele one works with. My clients are mostly (very) small businesses, and I find that the founders tend to have personalities that match my own (there's probably some social engineering going on there, but that's another topic).

All in all, great post! I'm glad someone put a name to the phenomenon... do you mind if your readers use the term? (Thought I'd ask...)

By: Dave Wood

Dave Wood — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:59:19 +0000

Great post. Wondering how you resolve conflict between designing a site persona for your new and (hopefully) up-market target audience and at the same time keeping it familiar and friendly for your current (not quite as up market) audience. Basically how quickly do you change your site if you want to move forward? Do you make it 50:50 for new:old or err on the side of the new prospects? Cheers :)