What Your Website Was Supposed to Do

The first working day

Almost every small business website was built for a reason that fits in one sentence: get the phone ringing, bring in quote requests, fill the appointment book, or stop the office answering the same questions.

Then the site was finished, the invoice was paid, and the sentence was forgotten.

A few years later the site is still there, doing several things, none of them quite the original job.

The first working day of the year is a good day to find that sentence again. It costs nothing, and it tells you what to fix before anything else.

The jobs sites are built for

• Calls, for businesses where the work starts with a conversation.
• Quote requests, for work that has to be priced before anyone visits.
• Bookings, for appointments, classes, tables or rentals.
• Fewer phone questions about hours, prices, parking and what to bring.
• Reassurance for people who were referred and want to check you exist.
• Job applications, when finding staff is harder than finding customers.

The fourth is the one owners forget they asked for. A site meant to answer questions is judged by calls that stop coming, which nobody counts, so nobody notices when it stops doing the job.

How a site drifts

Nobody decides to abandon the original job. It wears away.

A slideshow goes on the home page because the old one looked plain. A news section starts well and stops in its third month. Somebody adds a social media feed, then a newsletter box, then a pop-up.

A new service appears in the menu while an old one, rarely offered now, keeps its prominent place. The person who knew what the site was for leaves, and the next person maintains it without asking.

Each change was reasonable. Together they push the original job further down every page.

Find the original brief

Start with whatever was written down when the site was commissioned: the proposal, the quote, the first email to the designer, the notes from the first meeting.

Look for the sentence that says what the site should produce. It is usually there, in plain words.

If nothing was written down, answer the question now. Why did the business pay for a website, and what would have counted as it working?

Write the answer on one line. If it takes a paragraph, there are probably two jobs, and one of them matters more.

Check each main page against it

Open the five or six pages that matter most: the home page, the main service pages, the contact page, and whichever page most visitors arrive on.

For each one, ask whether it serves the job, whether a visitor can see the next step without hunting for it, and whether anything on it pulls the other way.

A home page built for calls should show the number near the top of every screen. A contact page built for quote requests should not open with a map and three paragraphs of company history.

Mark each page: doing the job, partly, or not at all. That list is the start of the year's plan.

A worked example

An electrical contractor with about a dozen electricians had its site built a few years ago to win quote requests for commercial work: office fit-outs, restaurant renovations, retail spaces.

By last month, the home page opened with a slideshow of the company barbecue, a winter safety tip and a photograph of a residential panel upgrade.

Commercial work was the fourth item on the services menu. The quote form asked fourteen questions, including the building's square footage, before anyone could press send.

Nobody had decided any of this. The slideshow came from a staff member who liked photographs, the residential page from a quiet spring, the long form from an estimator tired of vague requests.

The original proposal took ten minutes to read, and the fix followed: commercial work first on the home page, a short list of recent projects, and a form cut to name, phone, address and the job.

The estimator now asks for the rest on the first call.

When the job has changed

Sometimes the business has changed, not the site. A company that wanted any work it could get four years ago may now want only certain work, or need staff more than customers.

Then write the new sentence and judge the pages against that instead, because the site is probably still chasing the old goal.

What does not work is keeping both sentences equally. A site trying to do two jobs with the same prominence usually does neither well.

Counting whether it works

A job you cannot count is hard to keep a site pointed at.

For calls, a tally sheet by the phone for two weeks, noting how each caller found you. For forms, the submissions by month. For bookings, the booking system's records.

None of this needs special software, only one person who owns the number and looks at it monthly.

Once the number exists, every later decision about the site has something to be measured against.

Why this comes before everything else

January brings offers: a redesign, a search campaign, a social media plan, a chat box. Each might be worth doing.

None of them can be judged without knowing what the site is for. A redesign that looks better but buries the phone number is a step backwards for a business that runs on calls.

With the sentence written down, a conversation with a designer or marketer starts in the right place: improving one result, not making the site better in general. That is easier to plan and easier to judge.

The counter-case

For some sites the exercise is short.

A business that gets nearly all its work by referral may have a site whose only job is reassurance: proof that it exists, looks competent and can be reached. Checking that takes an afternoon, not a week.

And a site launched in the last few months has not had time to drift. January may be better spent adding what was left out at launch.

For everyone else: find the sentence, then check every main page against it before spending anything.

This week

1. Find the original proposal or first brief.
2. Write the job in one sentence.
3. List the six pages that matter most.
4. Mark each page as doing it, partly, or not.
5. Remove one thing that works against the job.
6. Start counting calls, forms or bookings.
7. Share the sentence with whoever maintains the site.

Step two is where the year's planning starts. A paragraph cannot settle an argument, while a single sentence can be held up against every page, every proposal and every request.

Most decisions about the site this year, from the next redesign to the next post on social media, get easier once that sentence exists.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.