Your Website in Three Questions

Building websites is a service we offer only infrequently. It’s an expensive, intensely creative process that only really satisfies either of us if you have a really clear brand and a really clear funnel.

However, auditing your website and giving our suggestions to make it convert visitors to customers is something we do regularly. Here are the three high-level questions we always ask about your website.

Question 1: Why have a website?

A good website is one that serves its purpose in your business. So the first question you should ask is always, “why do I have a website? What purpose(s) does it serve in my overall business plan?”

For most of you, the primary purpose of your website is to sell your online courses in a branded, credible, and easy-to-use environment. For some of you, your website also serves as a repository for free content (writing, videos), a way to book you for speaking engagements, and a place for your existing customers to reference information they need.

Question 2: What should users do there?

The single most important question that informs the design of your site is: “what is the one thing you want people to ultimately do on your site?”

Everything on your user’s screen when they go to your site and navigate around should, in as direct a way as possible, guide them to do what you want them to do.

Try this thought experiment: imagine your website is totally blank except for a single button that has your most important call-to-action. Now, what, if anything, could you add to that screen in order to make your ideal customers more likely to click that button? (If you can’t think of anything, the good news is that you can save a lot on web design!) After each element you add, repeat the question.

Question 3: Why are people visiting?

The next thing I ask is, “why are people coming to your site?”

Especially if you don’t have a lot of traffic yet, the answer to this question might overlap significantly with the previous one. That’s not a bad thing; it indicates why you want people to come to your site.

But if you have a high volume of traffic, or if you know the search patterns in your market, you can usually figure out why people visit sites like yours. There should be a natural dialectic between why people are coming to your site and what you want them to do there, and it should inform your decisions but not control them absolutely. You should give people a way to get what they’re looking for, and ideally you capture that momentum to lead them toward what you want them to do.

Who Your Site is For

Let us as an industry embrace the cold fact that your website is usually not for you. It’s for your customers. They are the ones who will spend the most time looking at your site (I hope).

Now, chances are good that your customers don’t really care about you–they care about themselves. Most of the time, most of your users are mostly self-serving. Except for your relatives you send your new site to when it first gets launched, most people aren’t reading your site so they can appreciate the hard work you put into each word or the clever way your designer made the background scroll while the text stays static.

Rather, your customers care about you insofar as they want to be sure that they are in good, credible hands. They want to know: can this person help me, and how do I get that help from them?

Your messaging should meet them where they are at, and guide them accordingly.

Sales Pages vs. Websites

A final note: We have a definite bias as an agency that specializes in online product launches and lead generation. That bias is that whenever there is money on the line, there should be as few distractions as possible. Many ecommerce gurus will disagree with me here, but when you publish a product in an online store, or with your site’s navigation bar at the top or bottom of the page, you are immediately turning your sales page from an experience into a commodity, and giving your customer something to do other than click ‘buy’ or leave. If you sell commodities and you like window-shoppers, fine. If you want people to buy your stuff, let them browse and make an informed decision and don’t get in the way.