Hi, this is Mary with Tiny Frog Technologies and today we’re going to be talking with Brian about having an effective website. We often hear you say to build a site from the outside in. What does that mean?
Build the Website from the Outside In
Well, a lot of times when companies design their websites, what they tend to do is get all the stakeholders together in one room and they decide what should be on the website. That seems pretty logical. But the problem with that is they’re not taking into consideration the people are going to be using a website, which is going to be the visitors of the site.
So what might happen is they will then craft a site that does a good job of meeting their needs – the stakeholders needs – anything they want to accomplish but not necessarily when a visitor comes there with their own agenda. It may not meet those needs very well. So the typical approach we see is building from the inside out. In other words, the inside stakeholders decide what the site should be rather than really pulling and understanding visitors, visitor classes and visitor intent.
How to Identify the Different Types of Web Visitors
There’s a few different ways to do it. There’s both qualitative information and quantitative information that can be used. For quantitative, you can go to your web analytics and learn about the various segments of visitors and how they’re behaving on the site. For qualitative, a lot of times, actually your staff – the people who have the frontline communications with your prospects – they know an awful lot about what are the typical types of questions that are being asked, what are some of the concerns, what are the goals. And then also doing customer surveys and online web polls also is a good source of information.
