Does any of this sound familiar?
The site is finished. The work behind it is not.
As always, not all of it. Two of these is usually enough to see where the site stops helping.
- An enquiry arrives through a form and is then typed by hand into something else.
- Nobody is quite sure what happened to an enquiry after the confirmation email went out.
- The same questions keep arriving, even though the answer is on the site, just not where anyone looks.
- The form either asks too little to be useful or so much that nobody completes it.
- There is no difference between an urgent enquiry and a casual one.
- The site was built years ago, and every change costs an agency and a fortnight.
Honestly
Most businesses do not need a new website.
They need the one they have to do something. A rebuild is the most visible intervention and rarely the most effective: it takes months, changes nothing about the work behind it, and is usually justified on the grounds that the old site is no longer to anyone's taste.
A rebuild earns its place when the site is technically finished, when it can no longer be maintained, or when the process behind it has to be rethought anyway. Otherwise the better intervention is often small and invisible.
What we build
The site as the first step of a process, not the end of one.
Enquiries that actually arrive
A form that asks enough to place the enquiry and little enough that it gets sent. What comes in lands where the work happens, not only in an inbox.
Routing by what it is
A billing question and an emergency do not belong in the same queue. The site can tell them apart before a person reads either one.
Answers that remove the question
Opening hours, process, who is responsible, rough price. Not buried in a legal page but where the question occurs. Every question the site answers is one phone call fewer.
A connection to what you already run
The site is rarely the only system. It becomes useful when it tells the rest, instead of being one more island.
Web development:
- Visitor
- Website
- Enquiry
- Workflow
- Follow-up
Where people stay involved
The site prepares. You answer.
An automatic acknowledgement is useful. An automatic reply to a complaint is not. What the site takes on is sorting, passing along and recording. What a person takes on is everything the sender wanted a person for.