Most websites exist to hold words, process words, and promote products and services primarily with words. They are fundamentally important in online communications, yet they are generally one of the poorest components in most sites.
Words play a central role in defining personality, whether spoken or written. Most people can identify the best brands purely by the written style of their communications.
Online, words have been under-valued since the internet's earliest days. In most cases, content is dumped into websites under the banner of 'repurposing'. In truth, this means that it has been copied and pasted from another source, usually printed, with little or no thought as to its effectiveness online.
Every established site has content living in, and attached to, its pages. In most cases, it does a poor job of representing its owner. To re-create a site successfully, real thought needs to be given to both the high-level stylistic use of language, the brand 'tone-of-voice', and the low-level written content that populates all the pages.
Written tone of voice is perhaps the most important and under-used communication activity available today. Defining high-level standards for the use of language is central to delivering a consistent brand personality, yet it is still rarely used.
Picture this: you meet a contact from a supplier on a regular basis as part of your job. Each time you meet, you catch up with his latest news, he tells you about his new services, and he provides you with detailed information on some of the aspects of his business that you've been interested in.
Now imagine that each time you meet, he talks to you in a different accent. Each service he discusses sounds like it comes from a different company. One time he's pushy, the next more reserved. And you can never tell whether he speaks for himself or his entire organisation. You find it hard to figure him out.
This would be decidedly unnerving. You may decide not to meet him again. At the least, it's unlikely you'd be very impressed. And the lasting impression would be of an organisation that is not very 'together'.
This is a simple real-world example of how a consistent tone-of-voice affects the end-customer.
The written content of many websites is exactly like this: lacking consistency on almost every level, and presenting a sloppy, unprofessional face to its customers. It's usually very hard to determine what type of organisation is behind the words.
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