5 Things I Learned While Building My New Website
No website is ever final. Websites are always a work in progress.
Welcome to my new website.
The site took 8 months, features over 50 client case studies, and tallied up to a working total of 317 hours between my team and me.
The new site was a labor of love, and I'm so proud of the final result.
However, while launching this puppy is a massive relief, I've realized that, in actuality, no website is ever final. Websites are always a work in progress. Here's what I learned (and will now be implementing into my business workflow) after getting through this enormous project:
1. Make note of questions that people ask about your business.
We went into this project with one major goal in mind: save time. This website was built to have all the answers to common questions about our work. As time goes on and we get inquiries, we're going to update our site immediately to address those inquiries. We'll know we're doing things right when we get no repeat questions between customers in the future.
2. Document your wins as they happen.
In our case, a win is wrapping a successful client project OR hearing about a client accomplishment after we've finished working with them. Take it from me: It's much easier to create one case study (as and when) than to do 62 at once, so we're going to stay on top of that with every finished project.
3. Constantly question your "why."
If you haven't read Simon Sinek's Start with Why, head to Amazon asap. This book deeply inspired our copy throughout the site, and I feel like we have a greater understanding of our business than ever before. Once we determined our "why," we made sure that our purpose and values were included on every single page.
4. Make it easy for people to start.
On our old site, if someone wanted to start working with us, they'd need to contact us for more information. That creates an unnecessary inbox bottleneck, which isn't ideal as a lean operation. On this new site, information about the next step to work together is on every single page so there's no way to miss it. We'll now be constantly fine-tuning these calls-to-action with the goal of getting bookings straight off of our site.
5. Continually reflect on your working process.
In a client-facing business, making exceptions in order to win deals is seductive. We did a lot of internal reflection and realized that our best client experiences and results came from following our set process. On our new website, we clearly write out our process and its value so inquiries can understand why we work the way we do. After every client project wraps, we're now going to internally ask ourselves what worked and didn't work, then course correct and communicate on our website.
There you have it! Distilled lessons from over 300 hours of work. Please share your thoughts below—I’d love to hear.
