5 Unexpected Places to Inject Personality into Your Site

Personality transforms a basic site into an engaging, entertaining one. It's what convinces first-time visitors to keep clicking and repeat visitors to come back. However, once you've added personality in all the obvious places – like your copy, visuals, fonts, and color scheme – you might not know what else to personalize.

If that's the case, check out these five places you can give your site a little personality.

1. The Error Page

Whether it's your fault or theirs, your site visitors will understandably be a little dismayed when they're shown an error page. But with a helpful, visually compelling, even amusing 404 or 500 page, you can make them forget their dismay-and build your brand in the process.

Let's look some well-designed error pages for inspiration.

Every detail of GitHub's 500 is great.

First, the illustration perfectly conveys the personality of GitHub: quirky, off-beat, not too serious. As you move your mouse around, the illustration shifts in response – a nice little piece of coding.

The copy is also on-brand, from the "Oops!!!" with not one but three exclamation marks and the helpful suggestion at the bottom.

The Muse's 404 page is similarly well-executed.

It's hard not to smile at the doleful puppy, and his explanation ("The address you entered is invalid, or maybe I ate it,") is pretty cute.

Rather than simply presenting links to various sections of the site, it says, "We have some great suggestions for where to go from here!"

Even NASA has crafted a creative error page.

Since a variety of audiences use the site-from young kids to professionals-it was wise to keep the message playful and space-themed without going overboard. (The space porn doesn't hurt, either.)

2. The FAQ

FAQ pages tend to be a little dry. That's understandable: they need to communicate lots of information as clearly, concisely, and matter-of-factly as possible.

Yet if you can do that while also putting some personality in, your visitors will thank you.

Casper has one of the best FAQ pages I've seen.

There are five main topics-each with its own adorable illustration. This makes reading about the "special blend of three types of foam" of a Casper mattress fun, rather than boring.

To enliven its support center, Squarespace competitor Jimdo used descriptive icons.

Not only does this design technique make finding the right section intuitive, but it's also in-keeping with how visual the rest of the Jimdo site is.

Product Hunt used a different approach. The styling of the Product Hunt FAQ is relatively traditional (although it maintains the overall look of the site), but there's personality in the copy.

For example, the first question is, "What's going on here?" This answers "What is Product Hunt?" in a more human way. There's also some easter egg questions, such as, "Where are my keys?"

Continue reading %5 Unexpected Places to Inject Personality into Your Site%

by Aja Frost via SitePoint