All too often companies create the website they want instead of the website they need. It's really common, but if you don't park your vanity and create the site you need, you might as well spend your money on something else.
And When People See This Page
We have lots of web related conversations with people that go something like this "And when people look at this page they will move their mouse over this picture and some text will appear to the left/right/above/below and then when they click it blah blah blah...". You know what, they won't. First off if they ever find your site, think yourself lucky, remember in web land you're normally just one of many. Second, if you make them work for the information they want they'll be back at Google in a flash looking at other options. Your website should treat visitors with respect and give them the content they need without making them work for it.
Don't make your website a game, it's never going to compete with the XBox, make it a powerful and useful resource your website visitors love, a resource that helps them solve their problems.
Start With Nobody Cares
I know I've been banging this drum for a long time but trust me, website visitors don't care about your business, they care about how you can help them. Of course, you need a great looking responsive (phone/tablet friendly) website backed up by great products or services, but don't kid yourself visitors to your site are going to put up with your animated landing page that stops them getting to the content they need. Neither do they want to listen to your favourite song or watch a video telling them how great you
Beam Me Up, Scotty
Have you ever been cornered by the bore at a party or a friend who insists on showing you their holiday snaps? It's a pretty debilitating feeling and I'm sure if you'd been able to get Scotty to beam you up, you would. Visitors to your website don't need Scotty, they've got their back button to beam them back up to the Google mother ship and if you don't give them what they need that's what they'll do.
Consider A Growth Driven Design Approach
If you're now convinced
In a nutshell, GDD ensures your new website delivers value into your business as opposed to the traditional approach where the website that’s created is, at best, an educated guess at what your business actually needs. It's the type of web development approach an inbound marketing agency will adopt.
GDD is a phased approach and has three key phases.
Phase 1
The GDD method of creating a website starts by developing a strategy, a piece of work that establishes your ideal customers and their needs.
During this process, you develop a deep understanding of your customers' needs, creating a list of assumptions on which to base your development work. You also develop a wish list of content and functionality your ideal website will have. This wish list could have anything from 50 to 200 items.
For each item, you need to understand why you're proposing to do it and what you expect the impact to be.
Phase 2
The initial strategy or Phase 1 is followed by the creation of a launchpad website. This website has the essential pages your site needs but it doesn’t try to be a final finished and polished site.
It’s always going to be way better than your current site in terms of aesthetics and content but it’s not trying to be the final site. The emphasis is very much about going live as soon as possible with the items on your wish list that your site simply must have.
You decide which wish list items to implement based on their expected impact and the time they are going to take to develop. It’s all about the 80/20 rule, the 20% of items that will drive 80% of the results.
Phase 3
With a launchpad website in
You draw from the wish list and the data you're gathering from your evolving website to make informed decisions on what’s going to have the biggest impact.
