When I really loved someone, I sold them. I’d tell a bride why she needed to call this photographer or that florist, give her the story, and watch her pull out her phone to look them up.

Sometimes I could practically watch the momentum disappear.

That experience taught me something I think about constantly now that I design websites: a referral can arrive at your website with a story about you already in her head.

Your website gets to continue that story.

In this episode, we’re looking at the referral handoff: what happens between “Oh my gosh, I have someone for you” and the moment that person decides whether to reach out.

I’ll walk you through the small things that can make that handoff easier, from being immediately recognizable to showing current proof of your caliber and making the inquiry process easy to find and use.

And there’s a simple test you can run on your own website: send someone there without telling her what you’re testing, ask her to contact you, and watch where she hesitates.

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What are you arguing?

Years later, I realized I still ask essentially the same question when I look at websites.

Every website is making a case for something through what it includes, what it emphasizes, what it proves, and who it seems to be talking to.

You get to decide whether that case represents the business you run now.

In this episode, I’m borrowing a framework from my teaching days and applying it to your website: the claim you’re making, the evidence supporting it, and the audience receiving it.

We’re also getting into the weird way websites accumulate old versions of a business over time. An outdated portfolio, an old offer that still gets prime real estate, a testimonial from work you’d never take today—good things can become evidence for a business you’ve already outgrown.

Once you know what your website is arguing, it becomes much easier to see what belongs there.

Mentioned in this episode: Sunday Strategy and The Sunday Files, Case No. 01.

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So I started counting.

For the first edition of The Sunday Files, I studied 35 luxury wedding planner websites across five markets and looked at the same things on every one: colors, typography, logos, imagery, headlines, language, naming, and taglines.

The patterns were hard to miss. All 35 use white or something very close to it. Three accent colors account for 30 of the 35 brands. “Luxury” appears on 16 homepages, “seamless” on 12, and “dream” on 11.

The more interesting question is how 35 very good businesses ended up making so many of the same decisions.

In this episode, I’m getting into what happens when everyone in an industry does the responsible thing and researches everyone else, the language businesses reach for when they’re trying to sound different, and what the most recognizable names in the group do differently.

Because this is a wedding planner study, but it’s very much an everybody problem.

Mentioned in this episode: The Sunday Files, Case No. 01. I put the full research, counts, patterns, and findings into a free case file you can read alongside your own website.

Get The Sunday Files: sundaymusedesign.com/sundayfiles

Someone asks who they should hire, where they should go, or whose work they should look at, and people already know the name.

That’s what Name Brand is about.

I’m Shannon Pruitt, founder and brand strategist at Sunday Muse Design®, and every week we’re going to look at what makes a business easier to know, remember, trust, and ask for by name.

We’ll talk about branding, websites, marketing, reputation, buyer perception, and the weird habits entire industries pick up because everybody is looking at everybody else. Some episodes will start with research, some with something I’ve noticed in the wild, and some with a question you can take straight back to your own business.

Because building a recognizable business comes down to understanding what people are seeing, hearing, remembering, and saying about you—and making thoughtful decisions from there.

If you’re very good at what you do and you’re ready for your brand to make that a little more obvious, you’re in the right place.

Follow Name Brand and start with Episode 1.