How to think about your next website

There are three things that I talk through with any client when I’m talking about websites:

1. You always need a goal

A website is a tool for helping you and your business to meet goals.

There may be one goal or a whole set of them. Those goals might be financial, they might be to do with behaviour change or creation, they might be clear and easy to quantify or complex and more qualitative - but they absolutely must exist and should be trackable.

Without these goals you may never know if your website is actually a good investment, which brings me on to the second point:

2. Launch is just the beginning.

Technology changes, behaviours change, your goals change and the resources you have available are always going to be limited.

The ‘traditional’ approach of building a website and re-building it every three to five years is a resource-intensive and slow way to meet these changes. Thinking of, and budgeting for, a website as a growing, evolving system that flexes and changes alongside your business is a much more useful way to approach the challenge.

3. A website is more than just a set of pages.

One of the easiest and least useful areas to get bogged down in when thinking about your website is what pages it should have.

Rather than thinking of a site as a set of pages and sub-pages, I help clients to think through the actions and journeys through the site that users will take. These journeys might take place on just one page, or they may span the entire site, but by focussing on them, we can make sure that they fit in with and contribute towards the overall goal or goals of the site.

Keeping these three things in mind when thinking about your new or current site will mean a leaner, more valuable, and more effective site, and one without unpleasant shocks and surprises a couple of months or years down the line.