Almost every founder I work with arrives with the same brief. The website needs to be better. The brief is reasonable. The diagnosis is wrong.
Sometimes the framing is more specific. The hero isn't landing. The case studies feel weak. The blog hasn't been touched in eighteen months. The contact form gets traffic and no enquiries. The agency we used last time gave us something that looks fine and converts at one percent.
I take the brief seriously. Then I usually have to give it back. The website is rarely the actual problem. The website is the visible symptom of a problem that started earlier.
Why the website gets blamed first.
The website is the most visible piece of the brand most founders own. It's also the easiest one to point at. You can open it in a tab. You can hand it to a designer. You can ask a copywriter to fix the copy. You can scope a redesign without admitting that anything deeper is broken.
The website is the easiest thing to blame because it's the easiest thing to pay someone to change. — On where the blame lands
That isn't what the designer or copywriter thinks. That's what the founder thinks when they sense something is off but don't want to name what. Spending money on a website redesign is a way of doing something visible while leaving the harder question untouched. Sometimes it works. More often it produces a better-looking version of the same problem.
What a website actually does.
A website does three things, in order.
- It tells a stranger who you're for. Without this, every subsequent line of copy is asking the wrong reader to keep reading.
- It tells them why you, specifically, instead of someone else. Differentiation, in language a buyer can repeat without notes.
- It gives them somewhere obvious to go next. One clear action. Not three soft ones.
That's it. The visual design serves those three. The copy serves those three. The structure serves those three. Beautiful photography on a site that fails the first two converts at zero. A clear answer to the first two on an unfussy site converts surprisingly well.
If your site isn't working, one of those three is broken. In my experience, it's usually the first two. That is a positioning problem, not a website problem.
How to tell which one you have.
Run two tests. Don't outsource them. They take fifteen minutes between them, and you have to do them honestly.
Test one. The founder paragraph.
Open a blank document. Write three sentences that describe what your business does, for whom, and why someone would pick you. No buzzwords. No "we help" opener. No bullet points hiding the fact that you don't have a sentence.
If those three sentences come quickly and feel true, your positioning is fine. The website probably is the problem.
If they come out woolly, or you find yourself reaching for "we work with a range of clients," or you have to write four versions before one feels honest, your positioning is the problem. The website is reflecting that back at you.
Test two. The cold reader.
Send your homepage to someone smart who has no idea what you do. Don't tell them anything first. Ask them, after ninety seconds, to describe in their own words who the business is for and why someone would pick it.
If they get within a couple of degrees of the truth, the positioning is fine. If they don't, your positioning isn't broken at the website. It was broken before the website ever got written.
What changes if positioning is the problem.
Almost everything you were about to spend money on gets resequenced. The brief stops being "redesign the site." It becomes "decide what the site needs to say."
Those are two different jobs. The first costs a lot, takes weeks, and rarely fixes the underlying issue. The second is uncomfortable, takes a few days, and changes the rest of the engagement entirely.
typical agency redesign quote I've seen recently. Built against a brief the founder couldn't defend in one sentence. The redesign was the wrong product.
If you rebuild the website before you decide the positioning, you are paying a designer to commit your indecision to a CMS for two years. The decision still has to happen. You'd rather make it before the bill, not after.
What to do if you suspect this is you.
Three small moves.
- Run the two tests above. Take the result seriously, especially if it isn't the one you wanted.
- Don't sign a contract with a web agency this quarter. Whatever they build, they will build to the brief you give them. The brief is the thing that's broken.
- Get the positioning question answered first. The workshop exists precisely for this. Four hours, written report, and then a website brief that's actually worth building from.
You can ignore the order. People do. It usually costs them between forty and a hundred thousand pounds and a year of their time, after which they call me and we work backwards. — On sequencing the spend
I'd prefer you didn't do that.