What we remember from our dream states can give us great insight into creating memorable websites, and lucky for you, your clients dream!
When you wake up in the morning, how often do you remember your dreams? As a child, we experience very vivid and exciting dreams, many per night and wake up with a mind full of wonder, reminiscing the adventures we just had in our magical dreamworlds. But as we grow older, the frequency of our dreams (or at least what we remember of them) decreases dramatically and it becomes less and less often that we roll out of bed in the morning, reliving the strange and wondrous happenings of our sleep state. While our adult minds still dream, our dreams get lost in the millions of other thought processes we carry out during the day and only the most fantastic or profound of our dreams manage to swim forward to our conscious and make us notice. Your website is really no different. That might sound like a terribly depressing thing, and if you’re boring . . . it is. However, for the rest of you it’s actually very good news!
Imagine that you are browsing the web and you do a Google (or Bing, no discrimination here) search for Medical Marijuana Doctor, or Medical Marijuana Lawyer as millions of patients, collective owners and curious minds will do this year. What you’re likely to get is about 17 million search results, the first 5 pages of which you may actually look at. So once you’ve come up in a person’s search result, or if your website has been referred by a friend, it’s likely that they are going to be looking at many other websites, most of which will stick to a prescribed method that will ensure they look like all the other websites in their genre. This is the safe way to design a new website, and while it might seem to be a wise investment of time and resources, it could actually be working against you. Think of it this way; How many times has someone asked you; “Hey, remember that restaurant we ate at last week with the totally marginal food and average decor?” or “Oh, you should totally wear that jacket you got that looks like all your other jackets!” My guess is not that often. Similarly, your target audience will rarely think to themselves; “What was the URL of that Medical Marijuana doctor? The one that looked like all the others with the same symbols and pictures? I really like that one!” So how do you ensure that you stick out from the competition? Look to your dreams, keep it Bowie!
David Bowie in Labyrinth. Awesome.
Like a David Bowie music video, concert, movie . . . well really anything to do with David Bowie, our dreams are vivid, strange, surreal and wondrous. They reflect on the nature of our personality and reveal a great deal about ourselves. An effective website should do the same thing. It needs to inform your visitors, but also leave them with an impression of who you are and the type of person they can expect to meet when they call you or walk in your door. It should speak to your personality as much as the details of your profession. If you’re a Medical Marijuana Attorney, you’ve got a lot of competition and most of the websites out there will have a very professional, clean look with references toward marijuana and and some medical imagery. This is the standard, and while I’m not advocating going completely nuts, interjecting elements of your personality and interests into the design and function of your website will go a long way toward allowing visitors to get a feel for who you are. If you’re a Jimi Hendrix fan, let your designer know that and don’t be afraid to do something interesting, push the envelope a bit. Wailing guitar solos playing all throughout your website might not be the best idea, but using a more vibrant color palette and typography speak volumes about the nature of your person and your practice, without undercutting your credibility. Not to mention that people can tell when a truly unique design was created, as opposed to using the cookie-cutter strategy of copying everything that is trending in your industry and simply re-presenting the same site used by all your competitors. It shows visitors to your website that you care enough to create something nice, something personal and thoughtful which reflects on your nature and ultimately their opinion of your practice. In the end, it could be the difference between being remembered or forgotten in a sea ambiguity.
As stated previously in the article, if you’re a Medical Marijuana doctor or lawyer, you’ve got a lot of competition and people viewing your website and will likely be viewing many others, it’s extremely easy to get looked over and forgotten with all the competition out there. If you’re approaching your website as anything other than the most important piece of marketing in your arsenal, you’re doing yourself a massive dis-service and falling behind your competitors that aren’t making the same mistake. In the year 2010, you absolutely need to have a website that is informative, easy to use and representative of who you are not only as a professional, but as a person. The best way to do this is to be honest about what you like, the type of person you are and create a web presence that is reflective of you and why you’re the one that everyone is looking for! You wanna stand out from all the others, create a website that your users will remember as vividly as a haunting dream and remember, everyone dreams in Bowie!
