Quick recap. Last episode, website design. We opened with a fire. Show your customer you understand their problem before you show them anything else.
Today we handle three quick practical questions on diagnosing your own website.
First question. What actually makes a good website? Strip away everything fancy, and it comes down to five things. One, it loads fast. Two, it works seamlessly on mobile. Three, it clearly explains what problem you solve within seconds of landing. Four, it guides visitors towards a clear call to action. Five, it looks unmistakably like your brand.
And that’s it. Miss any one of those five and the rest doesn’t matter. Everything else is a cherry on top.
Question two. How do you actually know if your website’s working? Most business owners don’t notice when their website stops performing, at least not until the leads dry up or a competitor starts stealing away customers.
Now here are the symptoms of a website that isn’t working. One, visitors arrive and leave immediately. That’s a high bounce rate, meaning nothing on the page gave them a reason to stay. Two, nobody contacts you through your site. Maybe the forms are broken, buried, or they’re not inviting enough to bother with. Three, you’re getting traffic but no conversions. People are finding you but doing nothing once they arrive. Four, it looks different or broken on a phone, which matters enormously since roughly two-thirds of internet traffic today is mobile, and that number is growing. Five, and the clearest signal of all, you hesitate before giving out your own URL.
If that last one is you, you already know your website’s a liability. You just haven’t said it out loud yet.
The good news: every one of those is fixable. The better news: fixing it rarely means starting from zero. Usually it takes a clear eye and an honest audit, and a designer who knows what they’re looking at.
Quick test right now. Google your own business, look at your site the way a total stranger would, and within seconds, can you tell what the company does, who it serves, and what you’re supposed to do next? If the answer is no, you’ve got work to do.
Third question, and this is one that makes my head hurt. Can I get my developer to design my website? No, absolutely not.
A developer is an engineer. They speak in code; they think in logic, structure, function. They wear sweater vests. They’re extraordinarily skilled at building things that work.
A designer is a communicator, a professional dreamer. They speak in visuals; they think in hierarchy, emotions, persuasion. They’re extraordinarily skilled at building things that connect.
Asking your developer to design your website is like asking the architect to wire the electricity. They might manage something functional, but I wouldn’t plug a shaver into it.
Get a designer to design it, get a developer to build it, and brief them both from the same brand manual.
Now, before we wrap, a quick one. There’s some exciting news coming soon about the book this podcast is based on, The Business Owner’s Guide to Branding. So keep an eye out for an update.
Next episode, we keep going. We look at the difference between UX and UI and which one comes first, why cognitive overload is costing you customers, and what a conversion actually means for your business.
That’s it for this episode of BRAND:NEW. Thank you for spending a few minutes with me. I don’t take your time for granted. If this helped you, share it with a business owner who needs it. And if you’ve got 10 seconds, please leave a rating. It would really mean the world to me.
I’m Donovan. This has been BRAND:NEW. I’ll see you in the next episode.
A good website begins by showing the customer that you understand their problem before showing them anything else. That is the foundation, and without it, nothing else on the page has a chance.
But once the foundation is in place, there are three practical questions worth answering. What actually makes a website good. How do you know whether yours is working. And can your developer simply design it for you and save everyone the trouble. Every one of those is something you can work through yourself this week, without a budget and without permission from anybody.
The five things that make a website good
David Ogilvy, the father of advertising, said, ” Strip away everything fancy, and it comes down to five things.”
1. It loads fast.
2. It works seamlessly on mobile.
3. It clearly explains what problem you solve within seconds of landing.
4. It guides visitors toward a clear call to action.
5. And it looks unmistakably like your brand.
That is the entire list. Miss any one of those five and the rest does not matter. Everything else is a cherry on top.
I want to be clear about how unglamorous that list is, because the temptation for any business leader looking at a website proposal is to be sold on the things that photograph well.
None of the five are exciting. All five are load-bearing. A site can be beautiful and still fail on speed, and a site that fails on speed fails on all of them, because nobody stays long enough to see the other four.
Miss any one of those five and the rest does not matter. Everything else is a cherry on top.
How to tell when your website has stopped working
Most business owners do not notice when their website stops performing, at least not until the leads dry up or a competitor starts stealing away customers. By then, the decline has usually been underway for months.
Here are the symptoms of a website that is not working.
Visitors arrive and leave immediately. That is a high bounce rate, and it means nothing on the page gave them a reason to stay.
Nobody contacts you through your site. Maybe the forms are broken, maybe they are buried, or maybe they are simply not inviting enough to bother with.
You are getting traffic but no conversions. People are finding you and then doing nothing once they arrive.
It looks different or broken on a phone. That matters enormously, since roughly two-thirds of internet traffic today is mobile and that number is growing.
And the clearest signal of all, you hesitate before giving out your own URL.
If that last one is you, you already know your website is a liability. You just have not said it out loud yet.
If that last one is you, you already know your website is a liability. You just have not said it out loud yet.
The good news is that none of this requires starting over
Every one of those symptoms is fixable. The better news is that fixing them rarely means starting from zero. Usually it takes a clear eye, an honest audit, and a designer who knows what they are looking at.
That distinction matters more than most people realize when they first go looking for help. A rebuild is a large, slow, expensive decision. A diagnosis is a small, fast, cheap one. Far too many businesses commission the first without ever paying for the second, and end up spending a great deal of money solving a problem nobody ever properly identified.
A rebuild is a large, slow, expensive decision. A diagnosis is a small, fast, cheap one.
A test you can run in the next five minutes
Google your own business. Look at your site the way a total stranger would, with no knowledge of what you do and no loyalty to you whatsoever.
Within seconds, can you tell what the company does, who it serves, and what you are supposed to do next? If the answer is no, you have got work to do.
The reason this test works is that you are the worst possible judge of your own website under normal conditions. You know what every button does. You know what the tagline means. You wrote half of it. Arriving cold through a search result is the closest you will get to seeing the page the way your customers actually see it.
You are the worst possible judge of your own website under normal conditions.
Can I just get my developer to design my website?
No. Absolutely not.
A developer is an engineer. They speak in code. They think in logic, structure, and function. They wear sweater vests. They are extraordinarily skilled at building things that work.
A designer is a communicator, a professional dreamer. They speak in visuals. They think in hierarchy, emotion, and persuasion. They are extraordinarily skilled at building things that connect.
Asking your developer to design your website is like asking the architect to wire the electricity. They might manage something functional, but I would not plug a shaver into it.
Get a designer to design it. Get a developer to build it. And brief them both from the same brand manual, so that what gets designed and what gets built are recognizably the same thing.
They might manage something functional, but I would not plug a shaver into it.
Where this leaves you
None of the three questions in this article require a consultant to answer. You can check the five fundamentals against your own site this afternoon. You can honestly recognize the symptoms, particularly the last one. And you can stop asking one specialist to do another specialist’s job.
What you cannot do is keep treating your website as a thing that was finished once and is therefore fine. It is the hardest working asset you own, and like every hard working asset, it needs somebody to look at it properly every now and then.
This article accompanies Episode 21 of BRAND:NEW, the podcast based on The Business Owner’s Guide to Branding by Donovan Fourie.
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