There was a time when a business website was essentially an online brochure.
You put your logo at the top, wrote a few paragraphs about the company, listed your services, added a phone number and an email address, and that was more or less the job done.
Things have changed.
Your website is no longer just somewhere people go to find your contact details. For many businesses, it is the first place a potential customer encounters the company. It may be where they decide whether you’re credible, whether you understand what they need and, quite possibly, whether they want to do business with you.
That’s a fairly important job for something that is sometimes treated as a digital business card.
People arrive with questions
Most people don’t visit a website because they are particularly interested in looking at websites.
They arrive because they want something.
They might be trying to solve a problem, find a supplier, understand a service, compare options or work out whether your business can help them.
That means your website needs to answer their questions quickly and clearly.
Who are you? What do you actually do? Who do you do it for? Why should they trust you? And what should they do next?
If someone has to work too hard to find those answers, there is a good chance they’ll simply leave and look somewhere else.
The internet is full of other options.
Your website has a job to do
A good website doesn’t just tell people about your business. It helps move them towards doing something.
That might mean making an enquiry, booking a consultation, buying something, downloading a report, signing up for a newsletter or simply learning enough about you to remember your business when they need it.
The job will be different for every organisation.
A university research site shouldn’t work like a plumber’s website. A professional association shouldn’t communicate in the same way as an online retailer. A small consultancy doesn’t need the same digital presence as a multinational company.
The important thing is knowing what your website is supposed to achieve.
Once you know that, decisions about content, structure, search and analytics become much easier.
Your website needs to be found too
There is another important difference between a brochure and a website.
A brochure generally gets put into someone’s hands.
Your website has to be found.
That means search matters.
Google needs to understand what your organisation does, what your pages are about and which searches they might be relevant to. Your content needs to be useful to the people searching for it, while the technical side of the site needs to give search engines a clear path through the information.
This is where SEO becomes part of the website rather than something you bolt on afterwards.
A beautifully designed website that nobody can find has a slightly unfortunate resemblance to a very expensive shop in the middle of nowhere.
Think beyond the homepage
One of the biggest opportunities businesses overlook is the information already sitting on their website.
Old blog posts. Reports. Case studies. Research. FAQs. Product information. Articles. Resources.
Sometimes there is a remarkable amount of useful knowledge there, but it isn’t organised particularly well or connected in a way that helps people discover it.
Your website should make that knowledge work harder.
It should help people find what they are looking for, understand what you’ve got to offer and discover things they didn’t even realise they needed.
That’s a lot more useful than a brochure.
Your website is part of your business.
It should be working for you, even when nobody is sitting in the office.
And if it isn’t, it might be time to stop thinking of it as a brochure and start thinking of it as a digital tool.
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