Show the User What You Know and Get His Help
Why?
You want to know your user’s profile: his preferences and behavior based attributes. The two conventional approaches today are to either ask him or make guesses based on his behavior. Both have flaws.
How?
Combine the two and iterate. If you already have some concrete ideas about the user, based on his behavior, show him what you think he is interested in, then ask him to help by telling you where you are wrong, inaccurate, missing facts, etc.
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Local Weekly Artist Profile
Why?
Help you find new interesting artists in your own city.
How?
Local volunteer editors search and pick one artist to be profiled every week. During this week, people can communicate with the artist on the site. He may also offer special deals for his art during the week. You can sign up for alerts in you city or multiple cities if you wish.
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Match Your Website to Your Target Audience
Why?
You probably have more than one profile (avatar) as your target audience. Using some principles of influence like authority and similarity can help project the right image for a particular visitor.
How?
Have different looks for your website, each projecting what you want to the current visitor. For instance, projecting authority to a corporate visitor might include a photo of you in a smart high-end suit giving a talk to a large corporate audience. At the same time for someone who has a small business they run from home, a more “rich guy” casual photo of you might project more authority to him. The technical solutions for doing this by keeping track of where the visitor came from, what ad or article did they read before they clicked and came to your site, etc., are already available, as well as dynamically modifying the look of your website. You should have a default look for your site, for those visitors who you don’t know enough about.
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