Your Website Needs a Job Description

Here is a test worth running before you spend another dollar on your site.

Write down, in one sentence, what your website is for. Not what it is about. What it is for. Then ask three people in your business to do the same, separately.

For the majority of businesses, the answers do not match. The owner says it is there to bring in enquiries. The sales lead says it is there to make them look credible on a first call. Marketing says it is there to rank for a list of keywords. The person who answers the phone says it is there so people stop asking the same questions.

All four answers are reasonable. But that's where the problem starts. A site built to satisfy all of them at once satisfies none of them, because the four goals are asking for different things. Credibility wants restraint and polish. Enquiries want friction removed and a clear next step. Ranking wants volume and depth of content. Deflecting questions wants a big, boring, useful reference section that nobody would call beautiful let alone read through it all.

So you end up with a compromise. The compromise looks fine. It performs badly in a way that is very hard to see, because nothing looks broken. There is no error message for a website that fails to persuade anyone.

The alternative is to treat your website the way you would treat a new hire.

When you hire someone you do not start with what they look like. You start with what the role has to produce, what it is responsible for, what good looks like after three months, six months, and a year, what their promotion pathways look like, and what it costs. Then you decide who fits.

A website is the same kind of decision, with one difference in your favour. It is the only part of your business that is available at 2am in the morning, and the only part that gets cheaper per unit of work the more work you give it. That is the whole opportunity, and most businesses never take it, because they buy a website as a thing rather than commissioning it as a role.

So write the job description for your website. Start that today.

We use this model at Qode, and we are happy to share the four lines on it. The rest of this guide is those four lines explained in more detail:

Your website should be found by the people who need what you sell.

It should be understood by them within seconds of arriving.

It should be acted on, meaning it gets them to do something you can follow up.

And it should do the work, meaning it handles part of the job that a person in your business currently does by hand or through another channel, medium, document, or whatever.

Four jobs, in that order. Each one is worth very little without the one before it working.