Many sites submitted had no concern for the user on the most basic levels. Rarely could you identify an idea or purpose behind the site, or name a possible user goal the site was intended to facilitate. There was no flow, no legibility, no usability. It wasn’t so much that the designers had contempt for their users as that they seemed never to have been taught to think about users at all.
– The rebooter’s children go rebootless, web design guru Jeffrey Zeldman
100 Character Development Questions for Writers is good for creative writers …great for web writers trying to get a fix on who a site is for.
Too often sites are developed in a user-free, competitor-free vacuum of lorem ipsum filler.
Worse yet, sites are developed by designers throwing their voice to “The User,” an imaginary friend who resembles no one. These imaginary friends do nothing but applaud ever decision.
An imaginary friend will never dare search using keywords different from the insider buzzwords only industry insiders use.
Want to be everything to everybody? Always willing to adapt, the imaginary user can play nobody in particular to support untargeted, generic web content.
Decide the web hasn’t matured since 1997? The imaginary user just discovered this web thingy, and your site was the very first they visited. No need to present them with something different or original, they’ve only been to one page: Yours. Isn’t that convenient.
Character development – properly done – presents the writer with a chance to escape the hall of mirrors web development has become.
Everybody supposes they know their customer, without having put forth the least little effort finding anything out about their customer. Knowing your customer doesn’t happen through analytics, it happens when you develop a big picture view that pulls analytic data together.
Finally, for advanced writers, you can develop a persona for clients. TV personalities aren’t very interesting when not in front of the camera. The web, however, has fallen in love with the bizarre notion if you simply be yourself, you’ll be several orders of magnitude more popular than offline.
And that’s why, when it comes to branding, most sites are like the guy at your school reunion whose name you can’t remember. And the fact you can’t remember them doesn’t even register a ripple of regret or concern.
TV personalities aren’t all that different from the “Party You” that gets trotted out in some social situations. It’s not exactly a caricature … it’s a character. The goal is to be distinctively memorable.
Writing with character doesn’t come from a Wikipedia scrape. Be a character to write with character.
So don’t think about character writing as some specialized niche skill. It’s a way any web writer can shift focus off userless web sites without a competitor in the world to vie with for limited attention.
Related:
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How to Create a Character Profile a little hint here. Pretend the character you write web content for likes short, snappy, paragraphs.