Modern website development for business growth

The site is a conversion instrument, not a brochure

A brochure's job is to describe. An instrument's job is to produce a measurable outcome and to tell you why it did or did not. Those are different briefs, and they lead to different decisions about structure, copy and instrumentation. Scope the project as the first and you get a site nobody can improve, because nothing about it was set up to be measured.

What actually moves conversion

In roughly the order of effect we see across audits, and it is rarely the order clients expect.

1. 1Message match between the ad, the page and the offer. The largest single lever, and the cheapest to fix.
2. 2Clarity of the primary action. One obvious next step per page beats five competing ones.
3. 3Proof placed next to the ask rather than on a separate page nobody reaches.
4. 4Form friction — every optional field costs completions, and 'phone number' costs more than any other.
5. 5Load performance, which matters, but far less than the four above once you are under about three seconds.

Build for the second version

The first version of any page is a hypothesis. The thing that determines whether you ever get a better one is whether the build made changes cheap. That means content in a source you can edit without a deploy, sections that can be reordered without a rewrite, and events fired on the actions you care about from the first day rather than added later.

“A site you cannot change is a site that will be exactly as good in two years as it is on launch day.”

What good instrumentation looks like

You need to be able to answer three questions without asking a developer: which pages produce qualified enquiries, which sources those visitors came from, and where in a multi-step form people stop. If any of the three needs a ticket, the site is not finished.

• A named event on every primary action, consistent across pages.
• Source and campaign preserved through to the CRM record, not lost at the form.
• Per-step drop-off on any form longer than one screen.
• A single dashboard that a non-technical person actually opens.