When starting any project I like to make sure everyone agrees what its purpose is. That might sound a bit obvious but very often I find we’re charging off towards a solution without actually all agreeing what the problem is. This is particularly tempting with digital things when you’ve seen some cool app or website and you want to play with it.
When planning our website redesign then I turned to my research partner, the internet, and went Googling for some wise words on what your website’s purpose could be. Turns out – nothing spectacularly useful for me in the first few search result pages.
There was loads of stuff about B2B websites and lead generation but nothing over-arching. That meant I actually had to think for myself, *eye-roll*. Actually I love this sort of thing but my inner lazy teenager was cross I couldn’t at least get a head start from the internet!
Four purposes for a website
Anyway, I think a website’s purpose can be some or all of the following:
- Transactional – people want to do stuff online: buy things, join things, subscribe to things
- Informational (not sure if that is grammatically correct but it fits my ‘-al’ format and I’m a sucker for consistency however forced in this context!) – people want to know something: opening times, what features you offer, who to contact
- Conversational – people want to interact with you/other people, largely through user-generated content: post a review, comment on an article, post feedback
- Promotional – this one is less user-focused and it’s when you want to publicise information about something: the great things you’ve done, why your product is better than everyone else’s,
What have I missed? Let me know in the comments, on Twitter or via jo@joannawalters.co.uk
Next, the questions are what should the balance be? Which of these are (or could be) push or pull factors? How do these categories fit with internal expectations about what should be on the internet?
Jo