Why doesn’t my website sound like me?

How does this happen?

Usually one of four ways.

• You wrote it yourself, late at night, and reached for words like “solutions” and “passionate” because the page was blank.
• You filled in a template, and the template had opinions.
• You looked at three competitors and averaged them.
• Someone wrote it for you without ever hearing you talk.

The result is accurate and lifeless. People who meet you in person are pleasantly surprised, and that surprise is the problem.

How can I test it?

Read your homepage out loud to a friend. If you would never say those sentences at dinner, they are not yours.

Then try the opposite. Explain your business to that same friend with no notes. Notice the sentence you say right after “honestly” or “what it really comes down to.” That is usually your headline.

What is the fix?

Someone has to write down what you say, not what you think you should say.

That is the quiet job of brand therapy. For ninety minutes I ask questions and you answer out loud, and the written diagnosis that follows is built from your own words. A documentary producer I worked with, Margaret Barry, put it this way: “What I got back was an explanation of my own business.”

Sometimes the fix is smaller than new copy. Justin Foster is a brand strategist who writes beautifully, so for Foster Thinking he wrote every word himself, and my job was the world around the words. Nobody writes Justin better than Justin. What he needed was outside eyes, not a ghostwriter.

Is this a design problem too?

Often. If the words finally sound like you and the design still looks like a bank, visitors feel the mismatch even if they can’t name it. The look and the voice have to agree. That is why I do the thinking and the design together.

Where do I start?

If this page sounded familiar, the Brand Smart Check will tell you in about three minutes whether the website is the whole problem or only the most visible part of it.