We start our design process from the premise that it’s easier, quicker and cheaper to build your website around your 
visitors: what they want to find and do – their ‘tasks’. This also works well with your business strategy as you get to know your customers better. We call this designing “the right way ’round”. Without going through this process, you risk getting your website “inside out”.
All the navigation and content on your website has a value. For most of your visitors the value is: quickly finding and doing what they want. Getting tasks done makes visitors happy and loyal. But all that value disappears if your visitors fail to achieve what they set out to do. You can get them to your site with the best search optimisation in the world but you can only keep them there with the best task-focused navigation and content.
For you, the value comes down to the cost of creating and maintaining every page. Which is too high if the page isn’t valuable to your visitors. A small number of pages will deliver most of the value of your website. But you need to know which ones and why. So it’s important to do your navigation and content first: find out why.
How we design
- Talk to you, find out what your website is about – the words you use and the strategy: it helps to complete the assessment survey
- Check a range of other sources, find out how others talk about and search for your industry
- We’ve developed techniques for testing potential visitors on this material
- Then we do more testing to work out how to organise the content
- We prepare the navigation and write the content down to the level you need: our services in about us
Check out who we’re working with on projects we’ve done. We’re confident you’ll be happy: our agreement
Why do the navigation and content first
Get better results. Words are powerful and continue to be the foundation of the web. Words are the basis of search, functionality and usability. Getting the labels right will improve your focus on what your potential visitors are looking for. It’s about psychology and behaviour. Facilitate the tasks your visitors want to do; give the impression that you are efficient and really want to do business.
It’s a specialty. Website developers and graphic designers want your business so they will commit to doing your navigation and content at the same time they build your website. But it’s not their specialty. They’ll base their results on other websites, fashions and novelty – not on visitor testing. Let them concentrate on their specialties – website functionality, look and feel. Incidentally, they’ll be pleased to have prepared navigation and content on your project because they’ll avoid costly time and budget blowouts from their end.
Save money on the project and into the future. Be assured your project will be faster – and therefore, less costly – once you’re armed with our service deliverables. You’ll know what’s important to your visitors , you’ll know what language your visitors use and how they think about your products and services – you won’t be swayed because you’ll have the data. Also, website maintenance is costly (despite what some may tell you about “setting and forgetting”). You’ll save money in the longer term because you’ll maintain pages that’ll deliver the best value; an efficient way to work.
Avoid headaches. Don’t get caught trying to build or redesign your website and create the content at the same time. It takes a lot of tries to get it right and you don’t want that happening while someone builds your website. You’ll just go around in circles and not forward to completion and launch.