Connection Café: What kind of animal is your website?

	What kind of animal is your website?
	Posted by Joey Martin at Jan 26, 2009 03:44 PM CST Categories: Content Management, Usability

Happy Chinese New Year! As we start the Year of the Ox it is a good time to take a step back and ask yourself, your colleagues and your users, "If our website was an animal what kind of animal would it be?". Lion, Tiger, Liger? Kidding aside, taking a moment to personify your website and determine a few key "personality characteristics" can help you determine how your organization is perceived on the www.

1. Is your website an introvert or an extrovert? Is the focus of the content on the outer world or the inner workings of your organization?

Extroverted example

Introverted example

2. How does your website gather information about your cause or your constituency - methodically or randomly?

Methodical information gathering

Random information gathering

3. Is your content written in an objective or subjective tone?

Objective tone

Subjective tone

4. Is your site orderly or casual?

Orderly site

Casual site

If you have taken the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator in your personal or professional life you may have been asked similar questions about yourself to determine how you interact with the world around you. And just like taking a test to determine your own personality there are no right or wrong answers. The end goal is to determine how your site is perceived outside of your organization and if that perception calls for a personality adjustment.

Adjusting or changing the personality of your site might be called for if your site is not communicating effectively with all target audiences your cause attracts. For example, if your organization works with doctors, patients and donors these audiences will only respond if your site effectively has a unique personality that speaks to their individual needs. Doctors may want methodical, objective and orderly content whereas donors might want content to be more casual and subjective and patients might want a little of both. Therefore you may need to organize your site with different funnels for each audience type so you can tailor content to match their needs and each audience type will perceive your organization as an effective agent of change for your cause.

Another situation that might call for a change in your website’s personality is a change in the status of your cause or campaign. Perhaps your cause is the defeat of a particular piece of legislation. Before the legislation is voted on you may have a site that would be classified as an extrovert. However, once the legislation is defeated the site’s personality may need to transform into an introspective one.

Revamping the personality type of your website can be time consuming and making drastic changes should not be done lightly (see New Coke). But if your target audiences’ perceptions do not meet their expectations this change might be what is needed to improve the success of your online presence.