Hello, this is Mikel with TinyFrog. I want to talk a little bit about how your website is put together, and we call it architecture.
Before you start a website, you should really be considering how you’re creating or how you’re structuring the website, and that’s done through what we call marketing and website strategy. So, before we start designing, we have a whole phase in anticipation of that or before that and that phase is all about putting together a plan: Talking about how it ties into your marketing, talking about what marketing channels are going to tie into your website, how many pages, how much content, how we’re going to structure the pages, how we’re going to organize and prioritize and label the content and the pages in the website.
So, all of that falls under the bucket of marketing strategy. So, one of the things we focus on is how we’re architecting the website, how we’re creating it. We like to take an approach that’s called persuasive architecture. So, basically what that means is when someone lands on your website, you want to persuade or guide that visitor from certain pages to other pages in the website and there’s a whole slew of strategies you can use through how the pages flow together, how they’re organized, using really good calls to action to drive, and links to drive people from one page to another.
The opposing way is called forced architecture, which is when you’re trying to force someone to do something and the best example of that is, I’m sure you’ve all had this experience, where you land on a website, and the first thing that happens is this big form pops up and you’re forced to have to fill it out. There might be a little X at the top you can X out, there usually is, but we don’t really like to do that because we don’t really like to force; we don’t recommend forcing visitors to a certain area they may or may not want to go.
So we recommend creating what’s called a ‘user path’ and persuading your visitors to go down a certain path by using, again, those calls to action and buttons and things like that. So, the overarching strategy that we strongly recommend when putting together a website plan is persuasive architecture. And some of the areas you want to drive your visitors to are:
- We might have a call-to-action page, a page that really describes your process and what it would be like as a next step if they decide to engage with you, with a really nice form; maybe just driving them to your contact form.
- If you have a website with a portfolio, you have products or services or things you’re really displaying, like we have a portfolio of our website projects on that. We really want to encourage our visitors to go to that page.
- Another one is your team page. People like to go to the team page and they like to see who they’re going to be working with, so you could drive people to your team page, which is another good one.
- Obviously, your service pages is an area you want to drive people to as well. If you have an educational section like a blog it will be really good to encourage your visitors to go to your blog page as well.
So there’s a number of different ways to create those different again, user paths, based on what the visitor is interested. So, the visitor, when they land on your website they can essentially self-select what area is the most important and they can kind of go from there.
So again, we definitely recommend when putting together a website or creating the plan for a website, using the process what we call persuasive architecture. Thank you!
