Website Design Training for Thermographers in Safety Harbor this week was a hit!
We were invited to do a session with this powerful group of thermography doctors. They are pioneering the popularity of medical thermography, and we were there to contribute in a small way. Our website design training was to educate on how to build a tribe, and what role their website design plays in making it a reality.
Why Build Your Tribe in Your Business?
You want customers. In the medical thermography field, you want repeat customers. Without a tribe, most sales are impulse purchases or one-time sales. With a tribe, you establish repeat clients.
How Does One Build a Tribe?
You build a tribe with three core principles. First, you establish your Values. Your Values determine which groups of people want to connect with you and which do not. Second, these often become codified in some form of Language. This codification of Values into Language gives the tribe framework to function with efficiently. Third, the use of the Language turns into meaningful Ritual. These Rituals reinforce the tribe’s sense of belonging, as well as strengthens the Values and Language.
This tribe of customers becomes repeat purchases of your products and services, and they also become raving fans. They will share your business with everything that encounter!
How Your Website Helps Build Tribe
As I told these medical thermographers, every website establishing tribe. It just may be doing it very poorly! Every website is sharing Values, reinforcing Language, and communicating Rituals.
If your website uses outdated design, it is sharing the Value of poor quality or late-adoption (of technology). If your website uses a spattering of Language (such as “Quality”) but the design is outdated, that dissonance of language (“we believe in quality but we don’t live it”), creates resistance in potential clients. And, if your updates, announcements, or posts all are outdated (think more than 3 months old), then the Ritual communicated to clients is that they can be involved with your brand about once a quarter.
That is when a website is establishing poor Values, Language, and Ritual!
The opposite of that is when your Values of quality and professionalism come through with the Professionalism, Content, and Functionality of your website. You see, because your website builds tribe by instituting:
Values – through design, hierarchy, colors, UX; which translates as Professionalism,
Language – through videos, articles, and downloads; which translates as Content, and
Ritual – through frequency of updates, freshness of message, announcements, opportunities for involvement as Functionality.
These do not have to be super expensive. They do need to be hand-selected.
Honest Self-Assessment of Your Website Design
You have to give yourself an honest assessment of how well your website aligns with your values, language, and ritual. Does it align with the message you are sending your tribe? Does it reinforce the way you want them to feel?
These are the questions we were able to direct at the members of the International Association of Medical Thermographers. We also gave them our assessment as a gift, so that they could hand it to their IT person and greatly update their website quickly and easily.
Side Notes from this Website Design Training: Remove These Things
Do us all a favor, remove or replace these things from your website:
- Drop Shadows
- More than 2 matched fonts.
- More than 3 colors (2 complimentary colors and an accent color)
- Script-based fonts
- Glossy buttons
- Beveled Buttons
This is just a start! Contact us if you want to talk more about what to replace these with.
