You ever walk into a busy restaurant and there’s no host? And you don’t know whether you should seat yourself? You kind of wander around looking, feeling awkward. And then finally a host comes, takes you to your seat. You wait some more. The waiter comes, takes your order, you wait some more. The food finally comes, and it’s good! But then you can’t get your check. And you’re frustrated because you really want to leave. So even though the food was good, the service was lousy.
Would you go back?
If you translate that to a website, think about it like this: You go to the home page, and:
- It’s disorganized
- It’s not well laid out
- You can’t find what you’re looking for
- You’re not sure what its purpose is
So you try to search, and when you get the search returns, they’re not relevant, and it’s confusing. Why was that returned to me?
Eventually, you poke around the website, and you do find some good content, but then when you go to download the PDF, the link is broken and it doesn’t work.
How would you feel? Would you be frustrated with the website? Probably so.
Websites are often created from an internal perspective. And that makes sense because leadership is paying for it. It’s important to them to demonstrate the capabilities and the features and the messaging or anything else that’s important from an internal perspective — but sometimes the way people think about websites internally doesn’t translate to a customer.
What we do is put the customer front and center:
- What’s relevant to them?
- Why do they care?
- Is it easy to find things and navigate the website?
- Is it easy to engage with you if they want to take it further?
When you shift and make the customer the reason that the website exists at all, it can become a powerful tool to build your brand.
I hope that helps.
Thanks and be well,
~Todd