Seth Godin shared some great advice on his blog today about how to build a better website. He did so in response to a query about whether or not his advice has changed since he released a book on the topic over a decade ago. The post was a timely one, because now that we’re opening offices nationwide, we just finished an upgrade to our own website. And as I did with several of the versions before this one, I tried to follow Seth’s advice for our revisions.
The heart of Seth’s advice is that every website should be built with the following questions in mind (I included my answers to his queries):
1. Who is this site for?
Our site is for people who are not yet a part of Collegewise and want to learn more about it and how we might be able to help make their college admissions process more manageable.
2. How did they find out about it?
Most of the people who reach our site get there by googling “Collegewise” or by typing our URL directly. That’s an important distinction. It’s more important for us to make it easy for someone to learn more about what we do and how they can get involved than it is to explain who we are and what college counseling is.
3. What does the design remind them of?
We've still got some work to do here. I'd like our site to remind visitors of a high school yearbook. High school yearbooks aren't selling anything. They're simply saying, "We're proud of our students, our faculty, and our school. Here are some examples of who we are, what we do, and what we've accomplished over the last year. Looks pretty great, doesn't it?"
(Note to private schools: Instead of giving prospective families a brochure, consider giving them a yearbook.)
No matter how big we get, our service is still one counselor sitting down with one family at a time. And while our web copy reflects that, we didn't get this right with our photos of students. We’d done several professional photo shoots in the past and we liked that the photos on our site featured real Collegewise kids, not stock photos of kids who’ve never worked with us. But while professional photos look nice, they don't feel very Collegewise. We tell kids to just be themselves and not worry about polishing or packaging–we should do the same. So later this year, I want to upload candid photos of kids and Collegewise counselors, videos of our kids banging the Collegewise gong as their parents cheer for them, photos of our counselors doing seminars for happy, smiling audiences, and other illustrations of how we really do make college admissions fun.
4. What do you want them to do when they get here?
We want them to take the next step in one of three ways–sign up for our newsletter, subscribe to our blog, or schedule an introductory appointment with one of our counselors. To do a better job of answering this question, we redesigned the home page to make finding and learning about the counselor/office close to them the most important function. There's a new pull down menu with offices arranged by state. And all of our offices are now listed on the Contact page.
5. How will they decide to do that, and what promises do you make to cause that action?
They’ll decide to do it because we’ve explained what we do and who we do it for, and we made it very easy for them to tell what the desired next step is. We don’t ever want a site visitor having to ask, “What’s next?”
The promise we make is that we will deliver exactly what they ask for. If they subscribe to our newsletter or blog, they’ll get great advice on a regular basis. We’ll never spam them with “Sign up now!” notices. And if they schedule an introductory consultation, we’ll use that time not to give them a sales pitch, but to help both of us decide if we’re the right college counselor to help them reach their goals.
Our site is far from perfect. And we’ve got more updates on the way that I’ll share as they go live. But Seth’s questions are a great way for any business–new or established–to make sure its web page does what they want and need it to do.