3 steps to create a website that works for you and your audience

You know your website needs an update but you’re not quite sure where to start? A website update creates an opportunity to evaluate what exists and to make it more useful for you and your customer. A simplistic view might be to take what currently exists and update it with new creative styling, but this will likely mean spending budget updating features and pages that aren’t required or don’t work as the user needs or expects them to.

By matching your needs and expectations from the website with that of your users’ behaviour you can create a pragmatic road map for any website rebrand.

It’s a simple 3-step process:

Stage 1: Your audience needs

Before you begin any data analysis, you need to create context and a framework from which to analyse the data. The way to do this is to create a picture of what your audience needs, alongside what you need (more about that later).

You will likely have a handful (we recommend up to 6) audience types who have unique requirements of your website. But within those groups, users will have varying levels of desires depending on their experience of your brand.

By getting to know your audiences you can build a picture of who they are, their goals/needs, their pain points, the questions that they seek the website to answer and their overall importance to your organisation. Depending on whether it’s an existing or a new audience, you can learn more about who you’re targeting through desk based research, audience interviews or surveys.

Ultimately, you’ll create an audience picture that will set the scene for developing website journeys, features and content from an external perspective.

Stage 2: Your needs and expectations

You know, better than anyone, your website, resources and how users are expected to engage with your brand. But the website update gives you the opportunity to evaluate whether things are working in the way the organisation expects them to and whether that aligns to the audience needs and expectations from stage one.

In a workshop format you can use the audience documentation to identify and document the existing website content that matches those needs. The second part of the workshop is to identify website content that is of importance to the business but currently not matched to an audience need.

Using these two workshop sessions you can create a priorities matrix of what is of most value on the website and focus your efforts on these areas.

Stage 3: Validate the findings

You can validate and enhance the research defined in the previous 2 stages using a combination of surveys, Google Analytics and HotJar, tools which you may already have on the website but can be easily added if not:

a. Analytics

Now you have a picture of the audience needs and business expectations, you can use analytics to identify any further key points of interest which may validate existing findings or give us further context for the HotJar analysis. We would recommend that the analysis focus on some of the following:

• Are the top performing pages gaining expected traffic?
• Are there any pages getting traffic that seems unusual or unexpected?
• Which pages have high/low bounce rates?
• Which pages generate most entrances/exits?

b. Surveys

You can validate and enhance the audience needs using on-page surveys. We always recommend that the survey is published over a one-month period to gather sufficient data. It should ask questions which build clarity around whether the user’s website expectations are being met, such as:

• Why have you visited the site today?
• Did you find what you needed?
• If not, what information would have been useful?
• What tools/information were particularly helpful?

c. Validate against HotJar data

Using the research to date you can identify a selection of HotJar screen recordings to gather insight on:

• Key entrance and exit pages: By understanding the journeys that these pages generate you can gather insight around particularly long or short journeys and what causes them.
• Feature and content interaction: Looking at the pages which have previously been identified as having high importance you can identify themes and trends in content/feature interaction to create opportunities for improvement.

You can also use tools like usertesting.com to gather feedback from users. This goes one step further than HotJar by allowing you to hear the user’s thought process as they complete various tasks on your website. It often provides a valuable insight into pain points that may exist and are more difficult to recognise through other methods of research.

Following the 3 previous stages in this project, you will have a clear picture of the audience and business needs and a sense of what is working successfully and what should be updated.

Some of our clients have the capabilities to carry all of the above out in-house and others call on us to help out with some or all of these stages. If you’d like to know more, we’re offering a free strategy session with our team of experts (for a limited time). It’ll give you a unique opportunity to quiz us and use our expertise to help provide insight into some of your current challenges.

You can contact Gill or Kirsty to arrange a time that suits on gillian@lewis.co.uk or kirsty@lewis.co.uk.