Yesterday we had a project management consultant come to our office to discuss providing services to analyze and help improve our company’s web design processes. But this post isn’t about that …

Instead, it’s about being who you say you are (or “show” you are, in the case of a website). During her visit, the consultant mentioned that her experience when she walked in our door and met our staff was the same as what she encountered in her visit to our Hile Design website (and fortunately for us, she liked what she saw in both places). That was music to my ears, and was one of the main goals of our most recent website redesign. Before starting the project, I reviewed a lot of other agency websites, and quite frankly, many of them began to look and sound eerily similar. For us, it was very important that we not only present our business services and design portfolio (all advertising agencies do that), but that we also communicate the culture (informal) and personality (friendly and creative) of our company to our site visitors.

Why? Because after 25 years in business I’ve noted that knowing who you’ll be working with is very important. As a matter of fact, most of the business relationships I’ve observed either endure or fail based not so much on performance as on issues related to corporate character such as honesty, responsiveness, friendliness and follow-through. A company can have all of the talent in the world, but if they are not focused on customer service or are hard to work with, they may not succeed for the long haul. I’m sure that all of us have at one time or another been burned in business. Perhaps it’s because the person we needed to reach never returned our calls, or they made promises that they didn’t keep. And perhaps sometimes the company that presented itself so professionally on its website didn’t live up to their claims.

What about your company? Do you communicate the real you? Does your company have a distinct personality, and is that personality communicated online? With a hundred other firms providing the same services as yours, what sets you apart? As an individual, you take pride in what makes you unique. Is it too much to ask the same for your company?

Tags: business relationships, Hile Design website, website redesign

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Advice, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.