What is your website’s purpose?

Identify Your Site’s Most Important Objective

A website is a tool, and in order for it to be effective, it needs to be built and used for a specific purpose.

What is your website’s purpose?

To answer this, consider your business type and where the website fits within your broader customer journey.

If you have a service business, you will probably want visitors to fill out some type of contact or lead form.

If you have a product business with a shorter buyer cycle, you will probably be seeking a direct purchase.

If you have a product business with a longer buyer cycle, you might prioritize email signups so you can engage leads in an email nurturing process.

Whether it’s one of these options or one of a wide list of other potential objectives, what’s important is that you identify a singular objective for your website
. You can have a few secondary objectives as well, but you need a single, primary objective for your site, or you will dilute your site’s ability to perform for you.

Decide How To Use Your Homepage

Our goal is to get people from arrival to action as quickly as possible and in the most linear way possible. In order to do this, we want to minimize the number of

pages included in the customer journey.

Option #1:
If you only offer a single product or service, that makes this really easy. You will use your homepage as a landing page for that product or service. This gives us

the possibility of a one-click customer journey. They can arrive on your homepage and convert without needing to visit another page.

If you have multiple products or services, things get a bit trickier. If one of your products or services accounts for 70% or more of your revenue, I recomend

sticking with Option #1 and using your homepage real estate as a landing page for that main product or service.

If revenue is more distributed, then we have two additional options.

Option #2:
If your primary website objective is email signups, use the “Upside Down Homepage” technique to maximize signups.

Option #3:
If your primary objective is anything other than email signups, use your homepage as a “Brand Building” page.

We’ll cover all three of these options in the following chapters.

Decide How Many Website Pages You’ll Need

Your homepage and service/product pages are where the money is going to be made, but you might need some other pages as well.

The keyword here is “might”. It’s rare for me to come across a website and think, “Damn, they could really use a ______ page.” On the other hand, I come across

websites every single day that have more pages than they need.

I always recommend having an about page and contact page, primarily because people expect them, and navigating to these pages are a standard part of engaging with a website for a large segment of consumers.

If you want to add a page beyond those two, first ask yourself, “Does this page increase the likelihood that visitors will meet my website objective?”

For example, you might want to add a testimonial page. Ask yourself if requiring the visitor to click away from your service page in order to view testimonials

will increase the likelihood that they meet the website objective? It might, or it might be better to incorporate testimonials directly into your service page.

There aren’t any objectively right answers here. It’s just a guess until you collect user data. But as a general rule, we want to reduce pages and make the customer journey as a streamlined as possible.

By now, you should have a clear plan for the pages that will be included on your website. Now comes the fun part. It’s time to begin writing your website copy!