What owners really mean when they ask for a new website

Websites have come up on most of my calls over the last couple of months. The request usually starts the same way. We need a new website, ours looks tired. And when we talk for a bit longer, the look is rarely what's actually bothering them.

What's bothering them is what happens after someone visits. A new product has to be typed in twice. An enquiry lands in someone's inbox and gets copied into a spreadsheet by hand. A member signs in on one page and renews on another, and the two never talk to each other.

Plenty of the sites I look at were set up years ago and haven't been touched since. Nothing's broken. They just can't do anything new.

How I see a website now

The way I see it, a website is your shop window and your front door. It's also the first place where the rest of your business either works together or doesn't.

If you add a product once, it should appear on the site without anyone typing it again. If someone fills in a form, it should end up with the person who deals with it. If someone is already a customer, the site should know that before it asks them to sign up again.

That's where the hours come back. A nicer looking site on its own doesn't give anyone their Thursday afternoon back.

How I go about it

We start with rough sketches, boxes on a page showing what goes where, before any colours or photos. Moving a box is quick. Moving a finished page isn't. It's also where owners work out what they want the homepage to do for them. Things get moved around a lot at that stage, and they should.

We switch the new site on in one go. Half a new website stuck onto half an old one just confuses the people you want to impress.

Before anything goes live, I want us both to be clear on what it takes to keep it running. Building it is only half the story. I'd much rather have that conversation early than have it arrive as a surprise later.

A fresh look is nice to have. What makes a new website worth doing is what happens after somebody clicks.