What should my new business’s website contain?

Dress maker

Wanting help to develop their business’s first website, this entrepreneur looked to us to help them understand how a website could provide an effective showcase for their brand, help keep their potential customers engaged, and complement their existing sales pipeline.

The problem

This young entrepreneur’s business had until now grown well via word of mouth and social media. Given that this existing sales pipeline generated plenty of business, they came to us for insights about how essential a website would be for them, and how to have it help them grow, so that it wasn’t simply absorbing effort, while offering little in return.

The solution

The sections of The Strategy & UX bootcamp are designed to cover, in sequence, the processes that will enable a web presence to be developed that supports business objectives.

1 – Markets & audiences

Until now the client had viewed their target market as one, pretty much, amorphous group. Working through these exercises resulted in distinctions being made that were based on audience demographics and readiness to purchase. Subsequently, these would enable the development of strategies for marketing and engagement that were tailored to each group.

2 – User engagement & sales journeys

The client ran their single social media channel very effectively. However, these exercises helped generate ideas for transforming the website from what was little more than a holding page into something that could play a meaningful role in the purchase journey, which in this case could have a lead-in time of several years from initial interest to making a purchase.

3 – Content

Many clients stumble with getting to grips with producing content that their target audience will find engaging. During this section of the workshop, we started to bring together the audience and purchase journey insights to form a plan for the kind of content that would be engaging for potential customers, and strategies to ensure a constant stream of it could be developed as part of the client’s workflow.

4 – Site structure & navigation

Creating engaging content is just part of the challenge, structuring the website so that it is both engaging and easy to navigate is equally important. During this section of the workshop, we looked at how to do that, hypothesising options for what would appeal to the target audiences, and benchmarking against the websites of similar businesses.

5 – Prioritisation

Ideation workshops will always generate both more ideas than are needed, and more than can be achieved. Prioritising is therefore an essential step. Here we revisited the potential markets, identifying which should be prioritised. The prioritisation was based on the business’s strategy, available resources, and the likely return on investment. The outcome was a plan that focused on delivering what would be most beneficial for the business in the most effective way.

The result

The Strategy & UX bootcamp gave the client a clear picture of how a website could help their business, what it would need to contain to do so, and where to start and what to prioritise so that development was manageable.

Understanding of the role their website could play in supporting their business, and sales pipeline
The content and structure that would enable the website to meet its business goals
Where to start and what to prioritise