Why we won’t build your website before we know who it’s for.
Scott Hough
Founder, Maison Digital
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Most website projects start the same way. A moodboard, a few sites you like, a list of pages. Six weeks later there's a beautiful new site, and the enquiries look exactly like they did before.
The design wasn't the problem. Nobody asked who the site was for.
A website is an argument
Every page makes a case to a buyer: why this, why you, why this price. You can't make that case well if you don't know who you're making it to, or what they care about.
Most businesses think they know. Ask who their best customer is and they'll describe someone. Then look at the data, and the people actually buying (the ones who pay full price, come back and refer others) are often someone else entirely.
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What we look at first
Before anything gets designed, we look at the numbers most businesses haven't got in one place:
Who buys. Not who visits. Who pays, and who pays without a discount.
What they spend. Average order value, and what it's made of.
Where they come from. Which channels bring in revenue, not just traffic.
Where it leaks. The enquiries nobody followed up, the visitors who nearly bought.
Plenty of businesses don't have this tracked. That's fine. Finding out is part of the work.
Then the website gets easy
Once you know who's buying and why, most website decisions make themselves. Which pages matter, what the homepage says first, what the photos need to show, where the button goes. You're not guessing any more.
Without that, you're paying for a site built on someone's best guess, and hoping.
The short version
There's no point building a website when you don't know who you're targeting or what the offer actually is. Find that out first, and every pound you spend after works harder.
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