Let’s face it, putting together a new website can be just a massive pain in the arse! There’s so many layers – it’s like peeling off the onion, layer after layer of complexity that can unfold as you go through the process.
But what makes it so difficult? Any marketer that’s been through this process will know all about it… but let’s uncover what happens when we first start to think about a new website and we get that business owner or the marketer through into our office to have a think about it.
Design & Technology Choices?
The first thing that people think we’re going to talk about, and they want to talk about is design and the technology choices that we’re going to provide. Now that couldn’t be further from the truth, we really just don’t even think about that to begin with.
Because why? I put my “MBA hat” on, rather than my “communication design hat” on which is all that design and tech stuff – and we think business strategy. We’re really getting inside the head, inside the culture of your business to find out how that new site can really drive your business forward. What are the components of that? Well I’m going to call it five Cs, and I’ll take you through that now. So we’re going to go through that now.
Company – Situation Analysis
The first one really it is all about your “company”. So it’s a situation analysis. Let’s call it… looking at you existing goals, where you’re at with your business, strengths, weaknesses, what’s your culture, what’s the tone of the site? How does the tone of the site need to match the culture of your business to really make you unique online – to give that end user experience of “hey this is who I’m dealing with.” This is you as a business and your personality online.
Then we also look at your product. So we’re talking about the four Ps of marketing here… the classic MBA speak about product, price, place and promotion of those products that you sell – all those services that you sell online. So all those things go into the company. What’s the next one?
Capabilities
Well it’s about capabilities, lets look at that… your ability to resource, not just the project but the website going forward – your HR I guess. If you’ve got a marketer and you’ve got copywriting and you’ve got ability to produce media and all of those things, then the experience of getting through that website project – they’re probably going to be pretty solid. But for a smaller business, that might be much more challenging. What components of your business can you really push through in to completing that overall project?But that’s also about your larger scale – well you know you might want to sell XYZ to ABC over here, but you may not just have the right team in place to do that. So you need to think about digital transformation to automate some of those processes to make sure your distribution can work. So it’s about capability there.
Customer & User Experience
The third one is your customer. So there’s so much talk online about customer experience and user experience, how you engage your audience through your site – so it’s a massive part of the overall planning. We want to see a picture of what they look like. The personas of each customer type and what market segments fit to that and the site needs to fit towards it.
Operating Climate
The next is the overall operating climate. I’m talking about your regulatory environment – your licenses, your privacy and consent requirements, how you can operate online depending on the type of business you are. Some businesses can do more online than others because they’re operating under a different rule set. So the operating climate can really determine that and we need to know what that is in order to to build a digital experience around that.
Competitors
And the last but not least, your competitors. So the big driving force that gets business owners in our door usually is their top three competitors are going gangbusters online and they’ve dropped the ball and they want to take their digital experience to the next level. It’s just to compete, just because they just don’t want to lose to the guy down the street that’s doing the same thing. So really think about what your competitors are doing online. Do some research into how they’re performing in Google, and how are they transforming their customer experience into that digital space.
So this covers a lot of ground. If you don’t nail these, then your design experience and your technology choices will fall short. You really need to think about every component in order to get great design and a great technology choice and a great end result. So over the coming weeks I am going to take you through each of these in more detail in an individual video and uncover one of those components that we really think about for you to be successful online.
