Regarding site design, the best way to get inside your consumer's head is to ask a lot of questions -- NextStage's CRO helps you come up with the list.

Recently a friend of mine decided to make the move from being a medium fish in a huge pond to being a huge fish in a small pond. In other words, he decided to leave his job as a mid-level consultant in a global consulting company and start his own consulting firm. He asked me if I could give him some ideas of the "do's and don'ts" of site design and composition. This has been on my mind greatly as of late because one of our NextStage sites is going to make the transition from a "Locals" site to a "Tourists and Locals" site over the next few months.

Basics

There are many levels to composition, and design is a fascinating area of study. I admit that I'm more familiar with musical composition than visual composition, and I'm willing to bet one of the big rules of the former applies to the latter -- you can break the rules only after you understand them thoroughly. That offered, let's start with some basics.

Fellow iMedia Connection columnist and author Rob Graham is a good teacher of basic design. One thing he taught me early on is to ask this question: "When you look at an ad, can you tell after a few seconds exactly what the company does?"

Now translate Rob's basic question into basics for your existing and/or "in development" materials and designs (not just for your website but for all your advertising material). Can people picking up your collateral material or browsing your website determine in a few seconds what your company offers or what you do? If not, redesign, and if necessary redesign from the ground up.

Look and feel means "how you look affects how they feel"

Mark Hrycak of Toronto-based The Pitch Company strongly suggests using a standard and distinct text font on all prospect-facing material. Using the same font across all material, digital or print, has good precedent -- the consistency becomes part of your branding. The moment that prospects see something with your standard and distinct font and graphics they will think of you and your company.

We should also recognize that fonts in and of themselves communicate a great deal. Fonts are the substance and context that add meaning to your material's form and content. In psycho- and neuro-linguistics this is known as the difference between "analog" and "digital" information.

For example, these two fonts convey very different analog (substance and context) meanings to a very simple digital (form and content) statement:

1. Anthony is a pretty boy
(Amazone BT font, similar to Courier)

2. Anthony is a pretty boy
(Verdana, a standard web font)

Most people will have separate and distinct reactions to that simple statement based on nothing more than the font in which it is rendered.

What it comes down to is simple: fonts, like people, have personalities (you can read more about this phenomenon here. You want your Tourist-directed material's personality to mirror the personality of your prospects. Not the personality of their marketing material, but the personality of the prospects themselves. This mirroring is why technically-oriented material looks different from sales-oriented material, and if you've ever seen sales material written for a very technical audience you'll know exactly what I mean.

The example that I use is this: if your prospect company was a person, what kind of person would it be? Write down a paragraph explaining their likes and dislikes, their motivations, their goals, their family lives, their strengths and weaknesses. From that you can determine the personality of the company you want to attract with your material.

Now get a book of fonts. Is there a font your prospects would use or do use in their collateral materials and website? Probably your different prospects use different fonts. What's similar about them? What do they all have in common? Is there a font which has the same kind of personality as your prospect companies do? When you answer these questions you've discovered what type of font you want to use in your marketing material.

What you've done for fonts now do for graphics, for menus, for menu options, all the way. Remember, you're not working to please yourself; you're working to create a look that makes your desired audience feel welcome.

Defendable questions, second questions

The next thing I told my friend was to write down one paragraph about what his new company was going to do. One paragraph only -- and he needed to work to make it a tight one. Now take out another piece of paper and start writing down the questions that prospects will be asking about his new company. Some of these questions are easy to come up with; "What do you do?" "How long have you been doing this?" "What's your track record?" "Do you have any references?"

Keep on writing down these types of questions until you begin repeating yourself, and make sure you have at least ten of these questions written down before you go on to the next step.

In mathematics there's the concept of "The Second Difference." In neuro- and psycho-linguistics this same concept comes across as "The Second Question." In both math and the two linguistics, the purpose of the second element is to reveal some core or primary aspects of the first element. In this step, we ask a question about each question we wrote down previously.

For example:

First Q: "What do you do?"
Second Q: "Why is knowing what I do important to my prospects and clients?"

First Q: "How long have you been doing this?"
Second Q: "Knowing how long I've been doing this is important to my prospects and clients because...?"

For each first question you need to form a follow up question. This follow up question doesn't answer the first question, it gets to the root of it: why is the first question important and to whom is it important?

If the second question isn't one of importance to the client or prospect, the first question isn't a question worth answering.

Where questions get answered

The one tight paragraph goes on your homepage, and it has to offer answers to each of the follow up questions you wrote in the above. That's your lead, your pull, your draw. Remember, you'll be creating this material for Tourists so you'll need to pull and draw them in right away. Now repeat this exercise for every page on your site, for every piece of collateral you're creating. Is this page or brochure going to be product oriented?

Ask ten questions prospects and clients will want to know about your products. Now create a second question for each one of those first questions, and remember that the second question has to demand elaboration of the first. The lead paragraph on each page or collateral piece needs to defend the answers to that second question.

This method is what I call "Defendable Questioning." Think of it as the wushu of collateral creation. By the time you're done, both you and your marketing material will be able to answer and defend your market position regardless of what you're asked.

Joseph Carrabis has been everything from butcher to truck driver to Senior Knowledge Architect to Chief Research Scientist. His 22 books and 225 articles have ranged among cultural anthropology, mathematics, information mechanics, language acquisition, neurolinguistics, psychodynamics and psychosocial modeling -- and other eclectic topics. His knowledge and data designs have been used by Caltech, Citibank, DOD, IBM, NASA, Owens-Corning and Smith-Barney among others. Carrabis is CRO and Founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global, and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Development Network. He is also the inventor and developer of Evolution Technology. You can download sections of Carrabis' next book, "Reading Virtual Minds" at www.hungrypeasant.com.