When you’re planning the structure of your new website, it’s so easy to start by thinking:

“What do I want to say to my customers?”
“How do I show everything I do for people?”
“How shall I display all the information I want people to know?”

All natural questions, it’s so hard to distil everything you feel about your business into the perfect words that will let others know how great you are, how important this work is to you, your years of experience, your hard-earned skills. But I’m going to let you into a little secret…

It’s Not About You

Well, it is a bit. Mostly it’s about balancing your business goals with your users objectives.

You already know your goals, or you wouldn’t have decided to update your website. So begin by asking “What do my website users need?”. If you are answering their questions, solving their problems, leading them to the next logical step, then your website will convert.

Understand Your Users

It’s time to get to know your users. This doesn’t mean a general demographic, this means actual people, with actual needs. It means research, surveying real people, finding out their needs, and the issues they experience.

People will come to your website at different stages: they may be well-informed, a past customer, waiting for an order, this may be the first time they’ve heard of you. You should have examples of all of these.

Look At The Data

Numbers don’t lie, if you’ve had analytics running on your old website then you have access to some key info. So often clients consider a particular piece of information crucial, but when we take a look at the stats, it’s clear that few visit the page, and when they do, they don’t stay there long enough to read the whole thing. So your family history is key to your brand story? it can stay – as long as the numbers prove you right.

If you spend some time over this planning stage, you will have a collection of clear user needs, and true data to help you prioritise your content according to real life. And you can be reassured that you’ve created a thoughtful website, designed to please your users – and achieve your goals.

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