Website Development and Design Is Broken

I have spent some time networking over the past couple of years and I keep having the same conversation, they happen so often that I am starting to keep count.

These conversations are all with founders, marketing leads and managing directors across completely different sectors and all of them say we get our new business through referrals and networking and the website is just there so people can check we are real and credible.

And I get it. I understand why they think that. Because that is how it has always worked for them and when something works you do not question it. Someone introduces you, the prospect has a look at your site, they see that you have a proper business with real people behind it and then they pick up the phone. The website did not sell anything. It just confirmed what somebody else already told them.

The thing that surprises me is that these are not small companies, these are established businesses turning over millions of pounds every year, they have offices, they have teams sometimes in the hundreds and they have been around for years. 

But their entire new business pipeline depends on either the senior leaders spending endless time in breakfast meetings or evening drink networking and whether someone they already know happens to mention them to someone at the exact moment they need it. That is not a strategy that is hope.

What I find even more interesting is that most businesses do not measure the real cost of it such as the hours spent at networking events, the coffees, lunches and evening drinks, the lost time and the follow ups that do not go beyond the first conversation. If you sat down and worked out how much each new client costs you through referrals and networking compared to what a website that converts strangers could produce for you, I suspect that the reality of those numbers would be uncomfortable.

I am not saying referrals are bad for business or even the wrong strategy, referrals can be the best converting leads when they come in, all that I am saying is that if referrals are your only lead source channel then your growth is obviously capped at the size of your network and the generosity of the people in it. 

The problem is not that these businesses are doing networking it’s their mind-set that extends throughout the entire culture of the business which also includes their website that only works as the last step in their overall lead generation process. Their site is a validation tool when it should be a lead generation tool. I believe that It should be the thing that starts the relationship and not the thing that confirms it after someone else did all the work.

That is what we built at Ronins and it is the same approach I used at my previous agency where it was the commercial engine behind scaling from two million to twenty two million in six years. Every service page is a self contained landing page designed so that a complete stranger lands on it from Google, sees everything they need to know, and gets in touch. 

In my scenario the website does the networking for us, and the stranger makes the first introduction leaving our role to be the most intelligent and charming agency in the room to convert them from visitors into clients.

When I say every service gets its own web page I mean that literally. If you look at the Ronins site right now you will find a separate page for every single service we offer and each one of those pages is designed to do one job which is to take a complete stranger who just typed something into Google and give them every reason to get in touch before they click the back button.

The way most websites work is that someone lands on the homepage and then they have to figure out where to go next. They click into services, they click into a sub page, maybe they find something relevant and maybe they don’t and somewhere along that journey they either find what they were looking for or they give up and leave. 

That is how many websites are designed and developed and I think it is the single biggest reason why so many businesses do not get organic traffic to their site and as a result get almost no enquiries from anyone who does not already know them. The site is trying to tell a story with confusing navigation, unstructured user journeys is enough to frustrate users

What we do at Ronins is treat each service page as its own mini microsite. Someone searching for “AI consultancy” lands directly on our AI consultancy page. Someone searching for “WordPress agency” lands on a completely different page dedicated to the search intent with completely different case studies and completely different copy because they are completely different people with completely different problems. They never see each other’s pages and they do not need to because everything they need is right there on the one they landed on. Each page is built for a specific target audiencewith its own layout, its own images and its own proof points.

These visitors have never met anyone who has worked with our brand, never heard about us before, so we have to make that page work hard with our subject matter expertise, clear visual case studies and social proof this is not our first rodeo. This landing page needs to drive engagement, be clear in its messaging and offer intuitive ways of making contact without visitors having to search for it.

When someone lands on our web design page and sees that we restructured the entire Montreaux Homes website around how property buyers actually experience their homes, the site started converting better because of it, or they land on a page with a case study that reads that we found in a prospectus “the most exciting school in England” and used it to reshape the entire brand strategy, those stories do something that a capabilities section or a list of services never will. 

They leave the stranger with a feeling that these people have done this before and they understand what the issues I am dealing with. That is a better user experience than any amount of visual appeal or design elements could produce on their own.

Yes and before you say it, I know that the bounce rate conversation is rearing its ugly head, it always does but it’s a made up stat that I don’t believe in and our bounce rates on individual service pages are higher than what most people would consider healthy for a website. But that metric is misleading when the page is designed to be self contained and drive conversions as people land on one page with a specific search intent and showing them a different search intent feels wrong, 

The conversion rate from our pages is higher than most websites we see and we do a lot of CRO and SEO work for clients to achieve high search engine ranking. So high bounce rates do not automatically mean a poor user experience, sometimes they mean the page did exactly what it was supposed to do.

This is not something I invented at Ronins either. I used exactly the same approach at my previous agency and it was the single biggest reason we were able to scale from two million to twenty two million in revenue over six years. Every service had its own page, each page ranked for its own keywords in the search engine results, each page attracted its own strangers and converted them into clients who had never heard of us before they searched. When I sold that agency and started Ronins I did the exact same thing again because I already knew it worked and now I am watching it work a second time with a team of five people and no networking budget. Our website does the lead generation and we focus on being professional enough to close.

I get asked this a lot and the answer is simpler than people expect. A stranger will get in touch if they believe three things by the time they reach the bottom of the page. They need to see that you understand their problem and that you have solved it before, and lastly do you make it easy for them to make contact.

Most websites suffer from one or more of these, The copy tends to talk about the business instead of talking about the visitor’s situation. Then the case studies are all about the implementation not the business problem they solved and the contact form is buried on a separate page to confuse users and even then you have to prove your human with a CAPTCHA statement before you are even allowed to say hello.

For us at Ronins every service page follows the same structure and is designed this way deliberately. The first thing you see speaks directly to the search intent and then the situation which brought them there in the first place. We take the stance that if someone lands on our web design page they are not interested in hearing about our design process or our tools or how many years we have been in business. They want to know that we understand why their current website is not working and that we have fixed their problem before.

We ensure our case studies do the heavy lifting. I have already mentioned Montreaux Homes and Hurtwood House but every page across the site has its own set of case studies that are specific to that service and that target audience. The case studies are there to remove doubt and gain trust as we believe that a stranger reading about a project we delivered in their sector or with their kind of challenge starts to become curious at this point because they can see themselves in the story. That is what I believe builds trust and confidence with visitors, it’s not the design elements, a poor website design, visual appeal or a visually appealing homepage with a video that autoplays, they play a part but the users have to see we understand them more.

Then lastly across all our service line pages, I place the contact form at the bottom. It should be located on the samepage as the content as the moment someone decides they want to talk to you there should be seamless user experience between that decision and the action we want them to take. With every extra click you put between a visitor and a contact form is a chance for them to change their mind and I have seen enough session recordings and Google Analytics data over the years to know that happens, they decide to get in touch, they click to the contact page, something distracts them and they are gone. On a self contained landing page that does not happen because the form is already in front of them.

Responsive web design is important and I am not talking about whether the site is engaging on a mobile devices across different screen sizes. Its not just about how the site renders it’s also the user experience, this article is a long one and its a hell of a commitment to ask people in responsive design on a mobile phone to scroll for what feels like forever to get the end. We test mobile responsiveness across various screen sizes as a large percentage of the website visitors who find us through search engines are on their mobile phones.

The whole point is that I see website success is when a stranger should be able to land on a single page, understand that you know what you are doing, see proof that you have done it before and get in touch without any hesitation. If your website cannot do that for them then it is not a lead generation tool it is a brochure and you are back to relying on networking to fill your pipeline.

I have lost count of the number of businesses who come to us after spending a significant amount of money on a website redesign with web designers or web developers that did not change anything commercially. 

Yes the website looks better than it did before, yes the photography is nicer and the fonts are more modern and someone has added some animation and parallax scrolling. But after launch the enquiries are exactly where they were before and the agency cannot explain why.

The redesign changed how the website looked without changing what the website performed. 

I often see this with clients who come to us after a previous agency has already had a go and I see it when I talk to businesses at events who tell me they had their site redesigned last year and it has not made any difference. The website looks beautiful and it does not do anything. That is bad website design dressed up as good website design and it is everywhere. These are poorly designed websites not because they are ugly but because they were created without a commercial strategy behind them. The design problems are invisible to anyone who is only looking at how the site looks rather than what it does for users.

We are working with Korda at the moment who are the biggest fishing tackle wholesaler in the UK and Europe. Their site is functional and their brand is strong but nobody on the board could point at the website and say what that investment returned. It’s currently seems as a cost centre that everyone tolerates because that is what that website is supposed to be apparently. We are not redesigning, we are reshaping what the site could actually become and ultimately become a high performing business asset.

When I was at my previous agency we worked with Weber Shandwick who had sixteen separate WordPress websites across EMEA. Each office had created their own website independently with their own interpretation of the brand design and their own unique content. This leads to the costs of maintaining sixteen WordPress instances with no head office governance, no web accessibility guidelines or approved media libraries and content. We built a shared digital platform with components and multilingual content workflows and launched it within six months and it eventually grew to twenty four sites,

The problem was never that the individual sites looked bad, the problem was that nobody had look at the larger commercial picture and designed the system for every part of the business.

That is what I mean when I say web design is broken, It’s not that people are building ugly websites with bad website design elements. It is that the entire approach to web development starts in the wrong place. The conversation starts with what should it look like and what pages do we need when it should start with what does this site need to do commercially and how do we structure it so that strangers can find it through search engines and convert on it. If you start with the second question the design follows naturally.

If you start with the first question you end up with a site that looks great and performs like a brochure.

There is a simple way to work out whether your website is a lead generation tool or a digital business card and it takes about ten minutes in Google Analytics.

We look at where your traffic is coming from, and if the majority of your visitors are arriving through direct traffic and referrals that means people are typing your URL in or clicking a link someone sent them. They already know who you are. Your website is not finding new people it is confirming you exist for people who were already told about you. If organic search for your service lines is a small percentage of your overall traffic then strangers are not finding you and your website is not doing any commercial work on its own.

Then look at what happens when people land on your service pages. If you have got pages dedicated to the things you sell and nobody is landing on them from search engines then those pages are invisible. 

User behaviour is where it gets really interesting and this is something I would not encourage anyone reading this to spend time on, instead install a session recording tool if you do not have one already and watch what your users actually do on your site. have sat through hundreds of session recordings over the years across our own site and client sites to gain valuable insights and the gap between what businesses assume their visitors are doing and what they are actually doing is huge. 

User feedback is the other thing that most businesses never collect. You do not need a survey, just pay attention to what people say when they do get in touch. If every new enquiry starts with “I was referred by” and nobody ever says “I found you on Google or in the AI search engines” that tells you everything you need to know.

We went through exactly this process with Catch. When we built their platform we created a digital strategy that fisheries would link back to their Catch listings and over time that meant two things happened at once. The website started to build up enough authority through those backlinks that it started ranking above the individual fisheries in search engine rankings and at the same time every new fishery that signed up brought their own audience with them. Their traffic started to grow organically year after year because the digital strategy was the growth engine and through targeted improvements to the optimisation we were able to build a sustainable business for them.

I have built two agencies now and what’s been consistent across both of them is the belief that the website should start a relationship.

At Ronins we are a specialist boutique agency and do not have a dedicated business development team or anyone whose job it is to go to networking events and hand out cards and follow up with coffees. We still do this but it’s an add on to our job and we love the social side of this as much as anyone. 

Every single day strangers are finding our service pages through search engines, reading the case studies, seeing the work we have done for clients like them and getting in touch. Our job at that point is not to sell, it is to listen and be consultative and the easiest people to work with.

That is what I mean when I say the client makes the first move, we are not chasing anyone we are not cold emailing and we are not tapping up our mates for referrals. We thrive on the warm inbound from a complete stranger and it is the most valuable kind of lead a business can get because the person on the other end already believes you can help before you have even spoken to them.

I know there are people reading this who will say that their business is different and it wont work for them, oh boy how many times do I hear that story, That’s fine you don’t have to adopt this approach I’m happy to pick up the clients you are leaving on the table.

The relationship still matters and the human conversation is still super important, I am just saying that for me there is a better way to get to that conversation started than spending three evenings a week at networking events hoping the right person is in the room.

The businesses I have been talking to all year who tell me that their website is just for credibility are leaving this entire channel switched off. And every day it stays off a competitor who has worked this out is picking up the visitors and the enquiries and the clients that they will never even know they missed. You cannot measure what you never had but I can tell you from twenty years of doing this that the number is bigger than most people would be comfortable knowing.

If your site is only working when someone has already been introduced to you then your web design is not broken because it is ugly or outdated, It’s broken because it’s not a working asset helping you grow your business.

If someone handed me a business tomorrow with no website and no clients and told me to build it from scratch I would do exactly what I have done twice before. Yes I would still attend a few networking events as I would have time on my hands but I spend a lot of my energies in getting my favourite lead generation source working.

If you have read this far and you are thinking that sounds like our website then you are probably right. The good news is that it does not take a full rebuild to start fixing it and the even better news is that once you see the first enquiry come in through Google you will never look at your website the same way again.

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