Here is a question worth sitting with for a moment. When you last thought about your website, whose opinion were you really trying to please?
If most business owners are honest, the answer is themselves. We want a site that looks impressive to our peers, that makes us feel proud when we share the link, and that finally says everything we have ever wanted to say about the company. It is a completely natural instinct. It is also, more often than not, the wrong one.
Your website is not for you. It is for the person on the other side of the screen who has a problem and is quietly wondering whether you are the one to solve it.
The trap of building for yourself
When you design for yourself, you tend to lead with your story. The homepage opens with a warm welcome and the year you were founded. The “About Us” page gets pride of place. The language gets a little clever, a little abstract, the sort of thing that sounds great in a meeting. Every department gets a menu item because everyone wanted to be represented.
None of that is wrong exactly. It is just aimed at the wrong person. Your visitor did not arrive to learn your origin story. They arrived because they typed a question into Google at nine o’clock at night on their phone, and they want to know one thing very quickly: can this lot help me or not?
What your visitor is really asking
Strip away the polish and almost every visitor is silently asking the same three questions.
Can you help with my specific problem? Not IT support in the abstract, but the frozen laptop, the dodgy Wi-Fi, the website that keeps going down.
Can I trust you? A real address, real reviews, real faces, and a sense that a human will actually answer the phone.
What do I do next? One obvious, low-effort step, whether that is a call button, a short enquiry form, or an invitation to pop in for a coffee.
If your website answers those three things clearly and quickly, it is doing its job. If a visitor has to dig through your history and your mission statement to find them, it is quietly costing you enquiries.
A few signs you have designed for yourself
You do not need a full audit to spot the pattern. A homepage that talks about “we” far more than “you” is a good clue. So is a navigation menu with a dozen options, jargon that only makes sense inside your own four walls, or a beautiful animation that looks lovely on your big office monitor but takes an age to load on a mobile. Most people will visit you on a phone, so the phone view is the real view, not the desktop one you admire while you build it.
Designing for the right person instead
The shift is simpler than it sounds. Picture one real customer, the sort you would happily take on ten more of. Give them a name if it helps. Then work out the exact question that brings them to you, and make sure the answer is the first thing they see, not the last thing they find.
From there, everything gets easier. The words become plainer because you are talking to a person rather than a panel. The layout gets calmer because you are guiding one journey rather than showing off every service at once. The call to action becomes obvious because you already know what you want that person to do next.
Your story, your history, and your values still matter. They simply move to where they belong: reassurance for someone who is already interested, rather than a hurdle for someone who is just trying to work out if they are in the right place.
The takeaway
A website that is designed for you might win compliments. A website that is designed for your customer wins work. Those are not the same thing, and knowing which one you have built is the difference between a site that looks nice and a site that actually earns its keep.
If you are not sure which camp your website falls into, that is usually a sign it is worth a fresh pair of eyes. It is exactly the kind of thing we enjoy getting stuck into here at E2, so if you fancy a chat (and a coffee), you know where we are.