Some businesses come to us wanting a new website when their current one isn’t really broken.
It loads. It works on a phone. Nothing is out of date enough to worry about. And it still isn’t bringing in work.
Read it closely and the reason usually shows.
The site can’t say clearly who the business is for, what it does for them, or why anyone should choose it over the next one.
It isn’t that the website says it badly. The business hasn’t settled what it’s saying, and the website shows that faithfully.
A website is a mirror
A website shows a business back to the world.
When the business is clear about who it serves and why, the site has something to say. When it isn’t, the site lists everything and convinces nobody.
You can usually spot it in a few places:
- The home page lists every service the business offers, with no sense of what it’s best at.
- Services are described in the business’s own words, not in the words customers use when they’re looking.
- Every page tries to speak to everyone, so no one feels it was written for them.
- People visit, have a look around and leave without getting in touch.
None of those is a design problem. New colours won’t fix them.
A new site on a muddled message is a more expensive muddle
This is the trap.
The website is the most visible part of the business, so it gets the blame.
A new one gets built: faster, better looking, properly put together. It launches, and the phone rings exactly as often as before.
The build wasn’t the problem.
It was built on the same unclear message as the last one.
Get the message straight first
So before we build anything, we ask the questions the website will have to answer:
- Who is this business for, specifically?
- What problem does it solve for them, in their words?
- Why should they choose you, and not the next result?
- What’s the one thing you want a visitor to do next?
Sometimes the answers come quickly.
Sometimes they take a few conversations, because nobody has been asked them in years. Either way, they shape every page that follows, so we get them settled before the design starts, as part of the build.
That’s what makes it a website that sells rather than one that just exists.
Marketing is its own job
To be clear about what this is and isn’t: ad campaigns, social media and marketing retainers aren’t part of a website package. If you need them, we can take them on as a separate job, done by a specialist we trust, and you’ll know the cost before anything starts.
Try this on your own site today
Write one sentence: who you help, with what, and why you rather than someone else. Then ask three of your best customers why they chose you, and write down the words they use.
Now open your home page. If neither your sentence nor their words appear anywhere near the top, the website isn’t the first thing to fix.