What’s In Your Image?

Recently, I had the privilege of having photographer John Cassidy critique my profile picture on Ecademy. This is something that he is doing for free for selected Ecademy members, and while my photo didn’t rate all that well, I found his comments and insights to be extremely helpful.

The short story is that my profile image does not inspire confidence. So it doesn’t matter how good my offering sounds, if your first impression of me is less than ideal, that will be the feeling that you carry through all our transactions. I thought that professional image consultant Sharon Connolly’s comments on the image were particularly insightful. She said in part, “I’m thinking biker dude, sat in a yard in the USA..dog on a chain and he has 25 parts of a motorbike strewn on the grass in front of him.” While this made me laugh, it isn’t exactly the first impression I want to give to potential clients.

As a WordPress Theme designer, I know the value and importance of that first impression. On the internet you have a matter of milliseconds before someone makes a judgement call on your site, and by extension, your offering. While your image should be genuine and reflect your unique personality, it is just as important to make sure that those first impressions reflect your best qualities. This extends not just to profile pictures, but to your blogs and websites as well. the first impression you make is the most critical in how people will assess you, your business and your products.

That impression comes straight from the gut. It is that initial reaction that says, “trustworthy” vs. “scary biker dude”. David’s job is to capture you on film in such a way that viewer’s first impressions are favourable. Sharon’s job is to help you make that impression in your face to face interactions. We want to do the same thing for our presence on the internet.

What impression is your blog or website leaving?

Before you begin planning a new blog, you need to ask yourself a few critical questions. First you want to have a clear idea as to what exactly you are expecting your blog to do for you. Establish your expertise in the field? Encourage email opt-ins? Be your own personal networking platform? Whatever it is, be clear on it.

Next you want to have a good idea of who your visitors are/will be. Are they personal contacts or prospective customers? Older or younger? Male or female? Bikers? Visit some forums that are related to your subject and try to get a good feel for who is participates in your area of expertise.

Now that you have those two things down, you can proceed to start thinking about the design of your blog, with one critical question: What is the gut reaction that you want to inspire in your visitors? Remember, you have a scant few milliseconds to make this impression, so the more “gut level” you can go in answering this, the better off you will be as you proceed. Do you want to inspire a feeling of satisfaction? Sympathy? Confidence? Whatever it is, that is where you start your design.

After that, you can start to choose colours and imagery that will convey that feeling. Also make sure to check related sites and blogs. Are they clean and simple, or do they provide plenty of up-front choices for visitors? Are they professional or more laid back in approach? How do they present themselves to their visitors? Is it working? From these questions your blog design will naturally evolve into something that resonates with your visitors on a gut level, and your site will be the site they remember for that feeling. And that’s a good thing.

One caveat, however: the best design in the world will not help you if your content is of poor quality. Make sure that you are as genuine in your content and offerings as you are in every other area of your life. Failing to do that will only help you to fail in the long term. It is better to have an ugly site with brilliant content, than a beautiful blog full of crap. And it naturally goes without saying that having a spectacular design chock full of fabulously helpful, informative and entertaining content is the absolute best.

My goal as a designer is to make sure that a bad first impression doesn’t colour your user’s perception of your brilliant content.

My thanks go out to John and Sharon for their insightful commentary and help on my profile picture. You can see their respective websites here:

John: John Cassidy Photography

Sharon: Maximise Group

Cheers, Marc