Writing

How a stranger decides, and what a website can do about it

Eight pieces on the path somebody takes from a search result to picking up the phone. What is known about how people choose under comparison, what that means for a business that sells a service, and how each part of it is built and then counted.

• Four tabs, ninety seconds

  Nobody reads your website. They compare three or four at once and pick one, and a page read against three others is not the same page as one read on its own.

• The same ask on every page

  A form on every service page is not wrong because it is a form. It is wrong because it is the same ask everywhere, and a page that never has to decide what the next step is never does.

• What happens after somebody hits submit

  The enquiry is where most professional sites quietly fail, and it is the part nobody looks at, because looking means submitting a real enquiry to your own business.

• How many people hired you from this website last month?

  Ask it of your own business. If the answer does not exist, that is not a bad number. It is no number, and it makes every change made to the website unfalsifiable.

• The sentence that decides whether they click you

  Before anybody sees your website they see two lines of text in a list of ten. On most professional sites those two lines are either missing or identical on every page.

• You are renting your own website

  If you pay every month and cannot take the site with you, you do not own it. Ten years of that is real money for an asset that never becomes yours.

• Who publishes the next page

  Every site is finished on the day it launches. What decides whether it still works in two years is who can change it and whether anybody reads what it did.

• Your vendor can build any path

  The constraint is not capability. Three things sit upstream of the building and none of them transfer: the decision, the verification, and the count.