What building sites for an Olympian and a PGA pro taught me about personal brands

Over the last couple of years I've built sites for a two-time Olympian, a Class A PGA Professional, a champion athlete turned venture capitalist and a Miami DJ. On paper they have nothing in common. In the first meeting they all describe the same problem.

Their story is everywhere and nowhere. There's an Instagram account, a few press articles, a booking link in a bio, an old site someone built years ago, a media kit saved as a PDF on a laptop. A brand manager or a journalist who wants to work with them has to piece it together, and most won't bother.

One home first

Natoya Goule-Toppin has run for Jamaica at two Olympic Games and reached the 800m final in Tokyo. When we started, her results were world class and her online presence didn't reflect them. Sponsors had no single place to see who she is, and she had a book on the way.

We started with the brand, before any pages. A mark, a palette, type, and written guidelines for how all of it is used. Then the site, the media kit and the book launch were built from those rules, so they look and sound like the same person without anyone policing it. Her site now does one job very clearly: it's the official place to learn about her and the obvious place to reach her.

Then connect everything

Angello Collins had four businesses that didn't know about each other: his coaching, the ClubHouse Sessions media brand, a golf event series and an apparel store. Someone who loved the events had no easy way to discover that he coaches, and someone booking a lesson never saw the store.

We treated the four as one system. Each site keeps its own job. The coaching site leads with his PGA and Golf Digest credentials and pushes people to book. The event site sells tickets. The store sells. They share one design language and they all point at each other, so a visitor who arrives anywhere can find everything else.

Brian Cunningham's site works the same way at a larger scale. It's built around his three identities, the athlete, the entrepreneur and the investor, and it doubles as the front door to every company he's involved in.

What I check on every personal brand site

Whoever the client is, I end up asking the same questions.

• Can a stranger understand who this person is in the first screen? Credentials and results go at the top, not on page three.
• Is there one obvious action? A booking, an enquiry or a partnership form. One route that works beats five that half work.
• Does the press or partnership material live on the site? A media kit someone can open or download right away saves an email exchange.
• Do all the person's other properties point back here, and does this site point out to them?
• Will it still look like them when someone else updates it in a year? That's what the brand guidelines are for.

What it does for the person behind it

Clients usually comment on the design first. What changes their week is having one place that holds the whole story and connects to everything else they do, so they stop answering the same questions by email. Reid Waters put it better than I would: he said it lets him focus on being a creative.