Why your website needs a story

To develop an effective story, you need to ask yourself these questions?

What Is your main objective?
How does your main objective link with your visitors?
Who is your target audience?
How will your message engage your target audience?
How will you visually represent your story?

The ‘storytelling’ buzzword

Through stories we are able to engage with people. For a website, communication is key, how we communicate to the visitor makes or breaks our website. The real question is what is the best way of going about this notion of ‘storytelling’?

Poor Storytelling

The main problem, is a lack of focus on telling the story of ‘what this is here for’. It seems to be a regular occurrence getting caught up in the millions of decisions made along the path of creating something, we tend to lose sight of how to tell our audience what we’re doing. Also when we think about creating a story how effective is creating web content that only involves one story? Stories shouldn’t just stand alone. They need to give people a reason to go further.

The power of a story

When creating a story, it needs to produce emotion. Ok emotion is slightly bold, but yes visiting your website needs to be a rollercoaster ride… but try not to make your visitors cry! Emotion involves a positive response from your users taking action and wanting to find out more about your services or products. The better your story, and the clearer your intention, impacts on a killer conversion rate!

Understanding User Experience

Effective user experience stems down how efficiently it is created. For a website designer, you need to start with why the website should exist, moving on to what the outcome of your website should be for a visitor. This formulates the basis of your story, how you build on your story involves describing the steps they must take to move through the story; each step can be a page or an interaction point in your design. Creating a narrative, you should begin to develop a tone of voice which you can use throughout your branding both visually and through your web content. Creating a narrative will also gain an insight into what to use for specific ‘calls to action’ and for details such as labels for buttons or navigation items. Lastly, creating a design for the homepage, having a story to build on will go a long way to developing that user experience you are looking for.

Focus on the people

The secret to telling a successful story through your website is allowing the visitor to connect with the story. It is hard to tell a story through your brand and products, so try to include visuals and actual content. Ultimately, stories are far greater than just your content. To effectively tell your story through your website, you will need to leverage all areas of your website design. Remembering that the difference between a spoken or written narrative, and one told purely through visuals and an interactive experience. The 4 key components to keeping users engaged and active is CONTENT, USER EXPERIENCE, VISUALS and PERSONALISATION.

Be above the crowd

This stems down to making sure your website's look and feel is in tangent with what you are offering. Think about what words are associated with your brand, and use that as a starting point to figure out how you can convey this message and story through your website. For a desirable website you need to it to be easily recognised and associated with your brand.