Before You Design a Website, Four Things Have to Be Clear

When a business calls us about a new website, the first sentence is almost always about appearance: the current site looks dated, a competitor's looks better, we want something more modern. In our experience, appearance is rarely the real problem. A beautifully designed site that does not know who it is for or what it should get them to do is just an expensive brochure.

Before anyone talks about colour, type or the homepage, four things have to be clear. Without them, every design decision that follows is a guess.

1. What job is the site doing for the business?

"Introducing the company" is not an answer; it is a description. The answer has to be a specific behaviour: collecting consultation requests from furniture factory owners, selling directly to end customers, cutting the number of repeat questions reaching support, or attracting engineering CVs. Each of those needs a completely different structure. A site that has to generate leads needs a short path and a simple form. A site that has to build trust needs documentation, case studies and technical detail.

2. Who actually visits, and at what moment?

The gap between "a factory owner looking for a software partner" and "an analyst told to compare three vendors" is not a small one. The first is thinking about credibility, track record and risk. The second is thinking about features, price and whether a comparison is even possible. One page cannot satisfy both at once unless it was deliberately built with a separate path for each.

• What question is the visitor carrying when they arrive?
• What did they search for before they got to you?
• What do they need in order to decide that they do not have yet?
• What would make them close the page without contacting you?

3. Where is the content coming from?

This is the single largest source of delay in website projects, and it is almost always underestimated. Design is a container for content. If the content is not ready, the design gets built on placeholder text, and on launch day it turns out none of the sections are the right size for the real thing. Our advice is to have at least the main pages written before visual design starts, even in rough form.

This is also the moment to settle who updates the content after handover. If an internal team is going to do it, the site needs a content management system they can actually use, not pages where every small change has to go through a developer.

4. What gets measured after launch?

A site nobody measures is a site nobody improves. Before launch it should be clear which number matters: qualified enquiries, the conversion rate of the services page, organic traffic on specialist search terms, or how fast leads get a reply. Without that, six months later the only thing anyone can say about the site is that it looks nice.

A good website is not the one that looks best on handover day; it is the one that can still be improved six months later.

In closing

Designing a website is not a graphics project. It is a set of decisions about how a business presents itself to the people it wants to reach. Once the goal, the audience, the content and the measure are clear, design becomes surprisingly easy, because every decision is an answer to a specific question rather than a matter of taste.