For about a decade, I worked in technology, and a particular kind of phone call came in again and again. Someone would ring, having already worked out exactly what was wrong and exactly what I needed to do to fix it. “The service is slow and you need to sort out the servers.”
The unfortunate truth is that the people who called like that were almost always wrong. The service wasn’t slow because of the servers. It was slow because of their own internet connection. If I’d simply done what I was told, I’d have spent time and their money fixing something that was never broken and the real problem would still be sitting there.
So I learned to do the opposite of what was asked. Instead of jumping to the fix they’d named, I’d go back to step one and work carefully through each part of the problem until I found the actual cause. Only then could I recommend the right solution. Not the solution they walked in with but the one that would actually work.
That methodology is the single most important thing I brought with me into web design. And it’s why I think most websites disappoint the people who paid for them.
So, do I need a new website?
Quite possibly, yes. I’m not going to talk you out of one. A website that genuinely works for your business is one of the best investments you can make, and small differences, done well, add up to a big one.
But here’s the thing. “I need a new website” is a diagnosis, the same as “you need to fix the servers.” It’s a fix someone has landed on, usually because the current site feels dated, or it isn’t bringing in enquiries, or it just doesn’t feel like them anymore. Those are real and valid frustrations. The problem is that “make it look nicer” treats the symptom, and a brand-new website built to that brief will look lovely and still fail to do its job – which is exactly the experience that left so many business owners feeling burned by their last one.
A website that disappoints almost always traces back to the same missing step: nobody did the strategy work first.
Why we’re all a bit blind to our own business
There’s a reason this is so hard to see from the inside, and it’s not a failing, it’s human.
When you run a business, it’s on your mind every single day. You know it inside out. And because you understand it so completely, you naturally assume everyone else does too. You feel like you only need to say something once for it to land. In reality, the people you’re trying to reach are coming to you cold, and you have to explain yourself clearly, more than once, in language that makes sense to them, not to you.
This is where an outsider earns their keep. I don’t know your business better than you do; you always will. But I get to see it through the eyes of the people you’re actually trying to win over – the ones who don’t already understand you. Put your knowledge of the business together with that honest outside view, work through it collaboratively, and you get something neither of us would have reached alone. That’s the whole point of starting with strategy rather than design.
What that looks like in practice
A care provider came to us wanting a fresh look and better photography for their website. A reasonable request – the old site did feel tired.
But before touching the design, we worked through who the site was actually for. The existing one spoke almost entirely to one audience: the families they care for. Warm, and important. The trouble was that around half of their referrals didn’t come from families at all, they came through local authorities. An entirely different audience, with entirely different needs, and the old site said next to nothing to them. The business knew this perfectly well; it simply hadn’t occurred to anyone that the website needed to say it, because it was so obvious from the inside.
So before any design happened, we planned the site around who was really reading it. A dedicated route giving local authorities exactly what they need to make a referral. And the family-facing pages rewritten around the real worries and questions a parent has when they’re searching at a frightening time, answering the concerns directly on the page.
They came asking for imagery and what they actually needed was to stop being invisible to half their customers. They got a genuinely new website out of it, but one built to do a job, not just to look better.
The question worth asking
So if you’re wondering whether you need a new website, that’s the right instinct but it’s the wrong first question. The better one is: what is this website actually for, and who really needs to understand it? Answer that properly and the website almost designs itself. Skip it, and you’ve bought a nicer version of the same problem.
That’s how we plan a website, and it’s why we start every project with the strategy and understanding before a single page is designed.
If you’d like an honest outside view of your own digital presence, that’s exactly what our free Digital Presence Assessment is for. We’re based in Norfolk and happy to talk it through.