Building a new web site or refreshing an old one

2024-10-21

For whatever reason, recently I've been asked by multiple, unrelated people to help them with advice regarding either building a new or refreshing an existing web site. The advice is usually much the same, and since it comes up pretty often, I thought I'd write it down for easier sharing...

• Why do you need a web site?

  Seriously. Think about this first. What are you trying to accomplish? For most organizations, it's some combination of:

  • Sharing information about your organization with interested parties.
  • Establishing credibility - showing that are you "real."
  • Supporting a business function, such as sales, marketing or recruitment.

• It's all about content and traffic

  • If nobody sees your web site, then it's not accomplishing much.
  • If people who do visit your web site can't find the information they are looking for (either it's not there or it's hard to find), then again it's kind of pointless.

• You have to do the hard work of writing the content

  Many people think they can just hire out the work of building and maintaining a web site. But some third party marketing agency that you just hired an hour ago doesn't know anything about your business and can't possibly create the relevant content.

  The heavy lifting of web site development and maintenance is all about content, which you can't farm out. It's difficult to hand it off to someone more junior inside your organization (unless you have say 50+ people!) and it's 100% impossible to farm out to someone outside your organization. Plan on spending some time writing and refreshing all that content, or don't bother with the web site at all.

• STEP 1: identify the audience

  • To start, create a list of "personas" that represent people that you want to communicate with via your web site.
  • Give each persona a name, for convenience.
  • For each persona, describe who they are - this is for your own reference, it won't ever be published.
  • For example, if you have a small company, the personas you itemize might include prospective customers, existing customers, prospective and current investors in your company, potential new hires, etc.
  • It's a good idea to organize all this information (pre-work) in a spreadsheet. Personas could be the first tab in the multi-sheet document, with each row being a persona and columns for name, description, relationship with your organization, etc.

• STEP 2: ask questions

  • For each persona, ask 5 to 10 questions. What questions would people like this pose to your organization? What information interests them? Write that down, one list per persona.
  • Do this in another sheet in your prep spreadsheet...

• STEP 3: consolidate questions

  • Different personas may have some questions in common. For example, potential customers and potential new hires might want to know where to find your office. Investors and customers might both want to know your origin story.
  • Look for commonalities in questions asked by different personas, and remove duplications. You should wind up with a single, "master" list of questions that your web site should answer.

• STEP 4: create page titles

  • Each question in the consolidated list above is basically a web page that you will have to create content for later.
  • Web pages don't usually start with questions. That's technically doable, but looks kind of funny.
  • For each question, you should come up with a page title that (briefly) captures what information you want to share. For example, "where is your office located?" might become "Office location." "What is your company's history" might become "Origin story." and so on. Write these down, perhaps in a third tab in your spreadsheet.

• STEP 5: Organize the pages

  • Web sites usually have a hierarchy of pages, organized by topic.
  • Your web site should likewise have pages organized into a hierarchy.
  • You already have a list of page titles, from before, right? So arrange them into topics and - where there are too many pages in a single topic, into sub-topics. Create a document hierarchy.
  • The document hierarchy can be yet another tab in your spreadsheet...
  • Don't forget to create placeholder pages for topics. For example, if you will have a topic of "Company" then you will need to create content for that as a page, as well as for each page that is subordinate to "Company."
  • You should now have a fairly exhaustive list of pages organized into a hierarchy. If you don't - something went wrong - go back and see what you missed!

• STEP 6: Write the content

  • For each web page in the list above, create a document and write something.
  • If you have an old web site, see if you have good quality, existing content to move over to the new site.
  • This is really a crucial step, and you cannot delegate it to anyone who is not core to the organization!
  • Edit and review the content. Make it good. This will be is your public face.

• STEP 7: Pause to reflect

  • Notice how you haven't done anything technical yet? You haven't hired out any work? Until now, it's all been about you and your audience.
  • From here on, you can start hiring out work.

• STEP 8: Find a service or hire a firm to make it real

  • Web sites require a domain name, hosting and HTML markup.
  • There are popular self-service tools like wix.com that help you manage this stuff on your own.
  • You can also hire a small firm or independent contractor to convert your work (document hierarchy, content) to a web site. This should not be expensive.
  • This is where things get a bit technical and you can hire out for help.
  • I can't really recommend any companies or services here, because I do this stuff myself using my own tools and my own hosting. How I build and maintain web sites is not likely the way you will do it!
  • Visual design happens at this stage. Don't bother with it until you have your document hierarchy and content ready -- web sites are about content, not fluff!

At the end of the process above, you should have a useful, informative and visually pleasing web site. Congratulations! You are not done...

Web sites are only useful if they have useful content and lots of traffic. But where does the traffic come from? Realistically, from search engines, such as Google.com. Even the new AI chatbots (like ChatGPT) are based on the same data that search engines use (they scrape, or "spider" your web site periodically). So how do you get search engines to pay attention to you?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a topic onto itself, but broadly they are looking for:

• Relevant content. That's all the work you did earlier. You might consider augmenting this work educational content that's relevant to your space but which may not directly pertain to your business activity.
• "Alive" content that changes often. Consider publishing weekly to a blog or similar platform. Publish everything to your web site first and then copy it to social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram. Host physical or virtual events and promote plus copy them to your web site. Publish frequent press releases and likewise host them both locally and on social media.
• Links, both from your web site "outbound" to relevant business partners and industry or educational resources, and "inbound" from those same entities back to your web site. The more links from credible sources, the better. Building such partnerships and getting them to mention you is hard work and pays off, both directly to your business and in search engine results.
• In short, a web site is a dynamic thing that you constantly update. Plan on that. You have to keep investing in it!
• Remember step 8 where you may have hired someone to help you publish your web site? You want someone you can work with over the long term, as you will be constantly pushing new content out. If you use a self-service publishing tool, then make sure you are comfortable maintaining your content in the long run.

There are also some things to watch out for and avoid:

• Avoid platforms (like WordPress) that tend to create very long, scroll-y pages. These pages are a nuisance for people to visit/read - how do I know what information will appear when I scroll down for 5 minutes? It's better to have a collection of short, to-the-point, navigable pages each of which has a clear message.
• Think about keywords that your audience (personas above) might search for, where you want them to find you. Try to find ways to embed these keywords or (more likely) key phrases in your content. Try to be authentic and organic with that, don't used forced language or just list key phrases in your pages.
• Never hire out content creation. What you will get back is crap generated either by an AI large language model or a third world low-wage contractor.
• Make sure your pages are simple and emphasize content over graphics or other media. Your site visitors want to learn something about you, not wait while some totally useless graphic loads and forces what they are trying to read down "below the fold."
• Check that your pages load quickly and render sensibly on devices with all sizes of screens (small phones, tablets, PCs).

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