What should your website contain?

Hi and welcome back to our jovial playground of “how you can purchase a website for yourself or your company in the near future and not get depressed enough to try and swallow a shotgun after your project has crashed and burned because someone made basic mistakes.”

So, if you read the first and previous part of Web 101, you know that I will be talking about houses as an analogy for building websites – because they’re not very different. We came to a shocking end by leaving the protagonist thinking what kind of house they want.

Just like companies, the homo sapiens has been around a lot longer than houses. We had the bare minimum by living in caves and like websites, houses are a new invention and they have been getting better and bigger all the time. Everybody would like to have the biggest and bestest and most expensive house, even if they wouldn’t actually need one. If we look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (see, I’m getting all scientific here) people need the simplest things to survive.

And the same applies for websites. This is why more and more websites are even more specified and they usually serve  a single purpose – and they’re effective. Of course, you might have different needs. So let’s spend a moment, thinking what kind of house do you need. Sure, you might need a bowling alley and a full size yoga studio, but I am pretty sure that most people can survive and function without them.

We could go even further and start to categorize people on what they need. Not demographics, target group analysis or segmentational studies, but something even better – Common Sense. I know, it’s unheard of, but bear with me.

Let’s start up with a few basic rules:

Most houses need to have the basics in order to function – toilets, kitchen, bathroom – just like every website needs the basics such as a working navigation, some channel to contact and relevant content. The way and quality these are done can make or break a house. These rooms are very important because they have a function by default. The other rooms are just rooms that might be anything depending on what goes in there and who will live there.

Which takes us to the main point – the inhabitants.

In real life, most houses and buildings are built by people who will not live in the house and websites are not any different. Just like companies don’t build their retail stores for themselves, but for their customers – why would the website be any different?

So who will live in your house? Is it a family with two kids and a dog? Is it a single bohemian night owl or perhaps a middle-age DINK unit. They all need a house, but they all have very different needs. They need a different amount of rooms, they have different requirements for location. These people and their needs define the function of the room and the site.

There is one big difference between houses and websites however. A very important one.

Websites can be expanded without limit.

I understand that people build extra rooms and floors because expansion is not easy or cheap, but with web it’s actually cheaper to expand later than building big from the start. Actually, if houses could be expanded (reasonably) like websites – if would make a lot of people happy. Imagine moving into a house, thinking that some wall should be elsewhere and the roof should be higher – and you could do it.

My point, start small – learn from your mistakes and your inhabitants and then expand. If it will be necessary.

So, we’re at the end again – before you go and see the agency who won’t spend the moment asking you the important questions, think who will be living in your house before you build or even plan it. Think of it as a business case.

Have a good midsummer, it’s a good day.

Related posts:

1. Why do you need a website?
2. How much to spend in a website?
3. Technology or Business?
4. Standard of living
5. Why you don’t need a community?