The core purpose of a website is to help your customers answer the questions necessary to do business with you.
If your website is a series of answers to questions then the success of your site depends on what questions you answer--it's the questions and answers that show the customer you provide a service they're looking for, you're a good choice and that they should buy from you.
In general every customer has the following questions:
- Who are you?
- What do you offer?
- Why are you different?
- Tell me details about what you offer.
- How much and what do I get?
- How do I order or contact you?
Your website, and each page of it, paints a glamourous story of your business, your offering and how it will benefit the customer. Good websites seemingly read your mind--they tell you what you needed to know, answered your questions and excite you to take the next step.
Defining the purpose of your site helps to set the scene for the project and defines the desired outcomes. The purpose of the site is largely defined by the purpose of your business so a strong understanding of your overall business goals is essentially to drive the purpose of your site.
The first step is to define a few archetype customers: fictional characters who represent significantly different groups of people you want to do business with. Archetypes will help guide what questions your site answers, what pages it has and what's included on each page. Your archetypes will ensure your site reads as a cohesive message to your customers.
Defining archetypes is such a fundamental exercise it happens similarly across various fields: marketers define market segments, information architects create personas. The drive is similar: to understand your customers; the output is different: our archetypes will help define the pages of the site and their purpose.
Your archetype customers don't have to cover every type of customer nor should they be stereotypical cliché customers. The archetypes you define should be real people who you consider to represent the most important types of customers. Archetypes, like real, complex people, often span different stereotypes. For example King Arthur was no doubt "a warrior" but in contrast also "the best friend" and "the professor".
How many archetypes you define depends on your audience. If you are a bookkeeping business you might think of the following people when creating archetypes: a sole trader looking for someone to manage her mess; a small-to-medium business owner wanting to grow and streamline her business; and an accountant looking for bookkeeping services for her clients.
United Airlines once had 19 market segments identified for a new version of their website but to move forward on a cohesive design they whittled it down to two archetypes: a business traveller who also books holidays flights; and the executive assistant who books flights for staff. Making design decisions based on 2 archetypes proved much more effective than juggling the needs of 19 market segments.
To define each archetype ask yourself the question: who is an example of a customer that I'd love to do business with. Once you've defined the archetype think about and define the archetype's motivations, needs and questions--the stronger you understand them the stronger your site will address their needs.
Each page on your site is a page in a story that addresses your archetype's main questions:
- Who are you?
- What do you offer?
- Why are you different?
- Tell me details about what you offer.
- How much and what do I get?
- How do I order or contact you?
The structure of most sites follow a similar pattern: home; about; contact; and various pages specific to your product, business, audience and industry. Though you might not have a strong understanding of sites you're in the best position to sit down and have a think about how you might structure your story, just like how you'd structure an TV advertisement, a brochure, or explain your business to a potential customer.
Your website may not end up with the structure you imagined but having sat down and sketched it out will put you in a great position to communicate your expectations and thoughts.
The home page should answer "Who are you?" quite strongly, and then provide brief answers to "What do you offer?" and "Why are you different?" so the customer is confident they came to the right place. At this point the customer might want to learn more about your company, find more details about your services or simply get hold of you.
The about page should answer "Who are you?" as well as strongly address why your business, and your general approach, is different to your competitors. This is a chance to excite them with who you are, not bore them with fine-grained details about your business structure. Showing authority might also be beneficial: associations you belong to, awards you've won, businesses you've helped. If you've ever seen the bottom of a good PR statement they'll finish it off with a few paragraphs about the business: this kind of short punchy statement should be the core of your about page.
The contact page should answer "How do I order?" as well as "How do I contact you?"
Your product or services pages should help your customers find the products that may fulfil their needs, differentiate similar products, educate them as to what solutions are available, excite them as to your offering and entice them to contact you for more information or commit to a transaction.
There's a lot to account for so the best way to start may be to define what questions the customer is asking whilst keeping in mind their journey thus far. For example at a bookkeeper's website if the customer has looked at home, read the about page and is now looking at a page describing a specific bookkeeping service the biggest questions they're asking might be "What service will you provide?", "How well would this suit my way of managing my business?", "How much does it cost?", "What else do you offer?"
If you've had a stab at all of the above you're in a great position to start working with a web designer or agency to help bring your vision to life.