07-05-06

We just cut over to our new website. You would think this would be a breeze for a firm specializing in Web strategy and consultation. Truthfully, the term “shoemaker’s children” comes more to mind. And yet we did apply much of our own process to arrive at the site we now have. Let me walk you through some of the process and decisions we went through, using ourselves as a case study for the work that we do.

One of the precepts to an effective site is knowing who it’s for and the business purpose it’s meant to serve. Through our own research, we’ve learned that our website is for three key audiences:

1. people who have heard of Ellipsis Partners, maybe through speaking events, other clients, or our volunteer work, and want to know more about what we do;
2. prospective clients looking for a consulting firm who may not have heard of us; and
3. clients who have used us in the past and are curious about what we’re doing now.

So two-thirds of the people visiting our site don’t really know us, or what we do. The other third may have only used us for one type of service. That level of unfamiliarity told us we needed to be very straight-forward in our design, navigation and language. Don’t make assumptions with people you don’t know.

So what do these three types of visitors want? Well, they want to know if we are the right firm to meet their needs. They want to know if we’ve done work like what they need done and if we’ve worked with clients like them. They want to know about us because they know this is a potential relationship. For most of our clients, cost is important, but it comes after we’ve established our credibility. So you‘ll see that our new navigation responds immediately to their questions: “what we do,” “whom we serve” and “who we are.” Therefore the strategic purpose of the site from the visitor’s perspective is “answer my questions about you.” From a company perspective, what we want the site to achieve is to (1) convey our credibility in such a manner as to (2) stimulate the visitor to contact us. So you’ll find that sprinkled throughout the site we provide the visitor an opportunity to make contact.

We also allocated too much space on our old site for NEWS. That was definitely an over-commitment on our part. Frankly, from week to week, we don’t have that much news, and again, the people who come to our site aren’t really looking for us to be a news provider. On this site, we’ll highlight what’s coming up or what’s been added, but we’ll leave real news to the other sites.

You may have noticed that there’s almost no “hot, new technology” on our site. We debate that all the time, but here’s a good case for staying true to your web strategy. People don’t come to our site to try out wikis or blogs or RSS or elearning. They come to find out if these are the PEOPLE they want to work with. That’s their objective. So we pull back on the temptation to use our site as a playground and try to stay focused on the Purpose.

Our redesign was also based on making it a lot easier for visitors to see the breadth of our services and history. After 6 years of business, over 100 client engagements, and over 10 years of speaking engagements, these long lists were getting onerous…both for us to manage and you to peruse. So in several areas of the site we’ve incorporated linked tables that allow the visitor to manipulate and view our information in the order or priority that he wants. We also rolled in all the content from the www.jeanneallert.com speaker site, as the general purpose and audience for that site is similar in motivation to those coming to the EP site (and why maintain multiple sites when one can do the trick?).

We also took some of our own advice and pulled back on the gratuitous graphics. Images need to convey information, not just add atmosphere. So you’ll see no more fluffy clouds, city sunsets or Roman pillars on this site. Instead, we called on an old friend (and highly credible firm), 4Thought Inc., (www.4thoughtinc.com) to give us a professional graphic treatment, a new logo and Web style guidelines.

I think it’s much cleaner and hopefully conveys what our customers have come to expect from Ellipsis Partners: integrity, credibility, and straight-fowardness.