Second or Third Time Around the Block
I imagine that if your company has been around awhile, your current website is probably the second, third, or more website that you’ve had built. Each time, you’ve probably been able to focus more and more on what users are looking for when they come to your website and what you would like to see get out of it.
However, if you are working on your first website, congratulations! Building a website is an exciting time for a company.
Either way, building a website results in hundreds of questions that need to be answered as the project continues. How you build it, what it looks like, where it is housed, how people get there, and other hundreds of questions all fall into place after you figure out the most important thing: what do you want people to do on your website?
A Website As an Employee
If you think of a website like an employee, it starts to define how a website works, what it looks like, and what it does. For starters, you wouldn’t hire someone to work for you if you didn’t have a job in mind for them first, right? You wouldn’t just go through all the effort of hiring a person if you didn’t already know what you want them to do. How would you even create a job listing if you didn’t have a job in the first place?
But people do this with websites all the time. They know that they need a website, they know it should have some information about what the company does, that it should maybe look a certain way so that it reflects the ideas and style of the organization, but, beyond that, they don’t really have any specific plans for the website.
You don’t build a website until you know first what you want it to do. And just like an employee, you wouldn’t hire someone if they didn’t have a job that was specifically linked to a goal or goals of the company. Employees deliver results on specific goals. They reflect the mindset, have the overall look and feel, and act on specific tasks built on the goals of the company. They are the heart of an organization.
A Purposeful Website
If you switch your mindset to figuring out what goals (there should be many but with specific ones or one in mind) you want the website that you are building to deliver on, then you will find yourself making decisions on your website that you might have floundered on before.
For example, if your goal for the year is to grow product sales by 50%, then you probably want to build an eCommerce element to your website so that you can sell products online. The way that your website is structured will be to drive users to the product pages and nudge them to buy. Or to capture their information in some way that you can nudge them with email marketing to come back to the website and buy. A good eCommerce strategy is a combination of effecting on-page marketing and email marketing to nudge them if they don’t buy at first. Right off the bat, you know that you need a website with an eCommerce platform, one that’s easily connected to an email marketing platform, that is integrated with analytics to track progress, and should be built by a company that can build websites with eCommerce platforms, create email marketing journeys, and connect the two.
Companies should know what goal/goals your website should deliver on before they hire whomever to build it, pick a color scheme, look at fonts, or even start writing content. Everything stems from the website’s purpose so you need to know that first.
We Build Purposeful Websites
When we start a website project, we ask questions that center around company goals, current workflows, and plans for the future. We’re looking to build a website that helps the company grow and is future-proof. We want it to help you get to the next level.