Give your website a job to do

The brochure trap

A brochure website answers one question: “Does this company exist?” That was enough in 2010. Today the people landing on your site already know you exist, because they found you on Google, on a map, in an AI answer or through a recommendation. They arrive with a concrete question and not much patience.

If the site doesn't answer it within a few seconds, they go back and try the next result. Nobody rings to say they left, so all you notice is a quiet inbox, and sooner or later someone decides the website “doesn't bring anything”.

When a site underperforms, the design is rarely the main cause. Usually nobody ever decided what the website was supposed to do.

Five jobs a website can do

Before you think about design or technology, pick the one or two jobs that matter most for your business. Most useful company websites do some mix of these:

1. Win trust. Show actual projects and the people behind them, so a stranger feels safe getting in touch. This matters most for agencies, consultants, architects and B2B suppliers.
2. Answer questions before they're asked. Prices or price ranges, process, delivery times, service areas. Each one you answer on the site is one less email, and one less reason to go with a competitor who did answer it.
3. Generate qualified inquiries. The aim is the right contacts rather than simply more of them. A good form asks just enough to separate a serious inquiry from a time-waster.
4. Take bookings or orders. Clinics, studios, restaurants, rentals. Here the website is literally part of the till.
5. Save your team time. FAQs, downloadable documents, opening hours that are actually up to date, a status page. None of it is exciting, but your team will feel the difference.

If it's a tool, measure it like one

Any tool has an output, so decide what yours is and start tracking it on launch day. There's no need for a complicated analytics setup. Two or three numbers you'll actually look at are enough:

• number of form inquiries or bookings per month,
• how many of them were relevant,
• which pages people read before they got in touch.

With those you can make sensible decisions. If inquiries arrive but they're the wrong kind, look at the copy or the form. If people visit but nobody writes, the site isn't answering their question. And if hardly anyone visits at all, you have a visibility problem, which is a separate conversation.

How to plan a site around its job

This is a shortened version of how we start every project. You can do it yourself on a single sheet of paper:

1. Write down who visits and why

Three or four types of visitor are usually enough, for example “a facility manager comparing cleaning suppliers” or “a parent looking for a dentist who's open after 5 pm”. Each of them comes with one main question.

2. Decide the one action you want

That might be a call, a booking, an inquiry or a downloaded price list. Pick one main action for the whole site and make it visible on every page. You can have secondary actions too, as long as they don't compete with it.

3. Build pages around the visitor's questions

Rather than starting from the default “About us”, “Services” and “Contact”, structure the site around what visitors want to know: What do you do? How much does it cost? How long does it take? Can I trust you? How do I start? The menu labels can stay familiar, as long as the content behind them actually answers something.

4. Remove everything that doesn't help the job

Sliders with slogans, stock photos of handshakes, a news section updated twice in three years. All of these make the important parts harder to find.

A small site can be a very good tool

You don't need fifty pages or a big budget. Some of the best-performing sites we've built have five or six pages, one clear offer and a form that asks the right three questions. In each case, someone decided upfront what a good result would look like.