Why your website needs strategy before design.

Most people start a new website by picking a look. A template they like, a colour, a competitor’s site they’d like theirs to resemble. It feels like progress. But a website can look great and still never bring in a single job.

Pretty isn’t the point. The point is whether the right people find you, trust you and reach out. That should get decided long before anyone picks a font.

Start with your customer, not your colours

The biggest part of my research before any site is getting to know your customers. Not your taste. The people who hire you. I want to know:

The first three are about them. The last one is about you. When those line up, a website almost builds itself. When they don’t, closing that gap is the whole job.

Pave the cow paths

Downtown Boston’s winding streets are said to follow old cow paths. Instead of planning a grid and making everyone use it, the city paved where the cattle already walked. Web designers borrowed the idea: pave the cow paths.

It works because you’re not asking anyone to change their habits. You’re making what they already want easier.

A website works the same way. If most people call to ask what a job costs, give them a sense of pricing up front. If they want to see your work before anything else, don’t bury the photos three clicks deep. If they’re standing in their driveway with a phone in one hand, make your number one easy tap away.

Good design isn’t about making people follow the route you picked. It’s about making their route easy.

What strategy covers

Before anything gets designed, I want answers to these:

• Who do you want as customers? And who do you not want?
• What do they search for, in their own words?
• What do they need to see to feel safe picking you? (I wrote about that in how I picked a roofer.)
• Which pages does the site need, and what does each one have to do?

Only then does design start. Design is strategy made visible, so the right questions lead to a better design.

Three ways it goes wrong

Starting with looks. Pick a style first, then squeeze the business into it, and the site ends up shaped around the template instead of the customer.

Copying a competitor. “Make it like theirs” sounds safe, but you don’t know if theirs works. You might be copying the reason they’re not busy.

Leaving the words for last. When the design comes first, the text gets written to fill boxes that were sized before anyone knew what needed saying. The words are what customers read and what search engines read. They shouldn’t be an afterthought.

The takeaway

A good-looking website that doesn’t bring in work is an expensive brochure. When strategy comes first, every design choice has a reason behind it: make it easy for the right people to find what they want, and to pick you. Then instead of a brochure, you have a website that earns its keep.

If you’re planning a new site and want it built on what your customers do, not on guesswork, let’s talk.