A lot of companies, especially small businesses think they need a new website design and embark on a lengthy, costly exercise which usually ends up in acrimony and failure.

There are a million or more reasons why this happens but it happens because you don’t actually need a new website what you really need is a new approach to your website.

The standard approach to building a new website is completely and utterly wrong.

The standard approach starts with design and a number of iterations of that design.  Then there’s your colour scheme, fonts, typefaces etc.

Then when you have a tasteful and pleasing looking website the build will start which is an all or nothing approach.

Some time after this you’ll have to produce content (by that we mean words and images).  The web builders will add this stuff to your website and when all the pages are populated, you will have a new website, which you’ll tell all your friends about and maybe even win a prize or two.

Some time after this you’ll start to see the same old results – very few visitors, little or no engagement and absolutely no leads.

You’ll question the web people, fall out with them maybe even refuse to pay them, but ultimately it’s your fault and you need to understand why.

The principle reason your website has failed to give you what you want is you probably didn’t specify to yourself and to your designers and builders what you want.

It’s not enough to say you want more visitors/engagement/leads.

You need to be much more specific and you need to think less about the design and more about your content, especially the words and not so much the images.

Let me be clear – if you are a multinational with a big pot of money and lots of products and services then you can afford to have a huge website, in fact you need to have a huge website, but as a small business owner you need to be a bit more focused and think about your message(s).

I would go further and say you need to cut your message down to one thing and it’s not your product or your service.  It’s all about the ‘problem’ you’re trying to solve.

This can be extraordinarily difficult to come up with because the tendency is to talk about everything you do to everyone you can possibly sell to.  

I’ve been wrestling with my own messaging of late because we build websites and lots of people do that and the result is that price becomes vital.  The problem that has thrown up is that Web designers/builders don’t care about the actual content of your website, they only care about building a good looking website with nice colours, images and typefaces. End of story, let’s get paid.

We can’t do that anymore because our method is time intensive and focuses on the content to ensure that you get the right visitors with a good level of engagement which drives leads.  Once we have some messaging and content then we can build a website that perfectly conveys your message to the correct audience with the maximum oomph to your business.

Otherwise what’s the point?