All the things websites make you think about
Mehdeeka Season 5, Issue 1
Welcome back! I have never been one for big intros so we’ll get straight to it. In the time that I haven’t written, I ended up working quite a lot on website rebuild projects, and collected a repository of “things to consider” that I’m going to throw out in this issue.
One thing I noticed was that a lot of the time, when website rebuild projects come up, they are often not built for marketers to use. Websites are often built in a way that means the marketer in charge of keeping it up to date has to ask someone else for help.
When you’re not a website expert (and I’ll never say that marketers should be), you’ll end up using a freelancer or agency to build (and potentially manage) your site. Someone like that who works with and builds websites all day long sometimes don’t remember what it’s like to not be an expert, and so they build things that make sense to, say, a developer, but not a marketer.
This just leads to the marketer who has to look after the website being kind of screwed over.
In my next issue I’ll talk about what I look for when appraising agencies, but today we’re going over all the possible things you might want in a website that you need to consider before engaging a supplier to build one for you.
All of my advice has a B2B SaaS slant since that’s my jam, if you’re coming from ecomm or self-serve style websites, there’s probably a lot I’m missing so take all of this with a grain of salt.
Things to consider before we start
Ask yourself:
How much of the website needs to be 100% manageable by yourself (or the marketing team)? If you find a typo, can you fix it yourself or do you have to ask a developer to do it? If you want to change the colour of a button, can you do it yourself? For each of the sections below, ask yourself this question.
The answer to this will greatly influence what tech stack you end up going with based on the person managing the site. WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) visual builders shouldn’t be discounted if they are what will get the job done the best, i.e. Webflow. Headless CMS has a time and place but is often heralded as the “next big thing” and people forget to ask “but can the person who is tasked with updating the website actually use this”. Classics like WordPress are still around for a reason - they are reliable. Consider all of these options and talk to a lot of people to find out which one makes the most sense for you.
For example, if an agency says to you “we only build on this techstack” then they will force you into that regardless of whether that is the right choice for you. I highly recommend talking to people you are not engaging for their opinion, they aren’t trying to win your money so they’ll be honest with you.Websites are for more than just the marketing team, make sure you check with teams like HR (to link to/post job openings) for what they need. Will you manage this for them, or do you want them to be able to do it themselves?
What might you want to offer in the future? If you currently don’t allow people to purchase through the website (as in everyone has to go through the sales team), might you want to introduce self-serve in the future? Consider and list out all of this. The worst case is wanting to introduce something new in 6-12 months and then being told “sorry, the website won’t support that functionality”.
List out all the tools that need to integrate with the website. If you want to run traffic split A/B tests, make sure you list that out too. Different pages might be hosted on different platforms, i.e. your platform might be headless, your main website might be on WordPress, your landing pages on Unbounce, etc etc.
Lastly, go to a bunch of other websites and look at their page types. Screenshot anything you like and categorise it by what the page type is. This is way more helpful than just sending a whole website to an agency and saying “I like this style”. If you have an industry section, then go look at other industry pages. Look specifically at home pages, landing pages, blogs and content pages, request demo pages, and so on.
PeerSignal has a pretty thorough list of companies/websites to start looking at.
Keeping something like a Miro board of all of these screenshots is the easiest way to organise it. If you don’t have Miro, Whimsical has a free tier you can use.
Functionalities
This will get long so I’m going to rapid fire functions your website might need. When writing a brief (to an agency or freelance dev), over communicating in minute detail what you want will get you a much better result. These are pretty much what I have needed over my career, so it’s pretty B2B SaaS, no self-serve focused.
Ability to create new pages, could be for future product releases, event sign ups, etc. Blogs are obvious and shouldn’t need to be pointed out here.
Ability to edit the navigation bar and footer.
Button types - not all buttons are the same and you want to be able to distinguish between primary/secondary. E.g:
A ‘resources’ page with filtering ability, sometimes you want to be able to see all content types (blog, webinar, downloadable) and sometimes you only want to see one type, or you want to filter by topic. Have your wish list for this mapped out.
SEO settings - it shocked me to find out not all websites have the SEO management for pages and content (meta title etc), so make sure this is listed out. When sharing a page link, the first image on that page is usually the default selection for any link previews (think like when you post a link on social media), having the ability to choose which image from the page gets pulled into the preview is a great function.
No follow/no index checkbox. Another shocker to find out not all websites have this, especially if you’ve had something custom built by an agency. Absolutely a must have.
Embedded media - a lot of people ask for native media but you’re probably missing out on analytics on them. Decide on your preference (Vimeo vs Youtube) and how you want to be able to pull these across.
Recommended reading module - this is like at the bottom of the blog where it’s suggestions of what to read next, a default of most recently published is good, but the ability to edit it to linked/more relevant pieces is even better.
Ability to add a CTA anywhere. If you have modules that are like text on left, image on right, you want to specifiy that you want the ability to slap a button on pretty much anything.
Templated pages - sometimes you want to be able to create a page from a template, e.g. a downloadable pdf page, so any pages that are repetitive in design, keep a list of them and ask for a template you can duplicate instead of building a page from scratch.
Pop ups, banners, and exit intent pop ups. You want to be able to place these on any page, and control how big/when they come up. A banner on the home page might be used to highlight a new feature launch, while an exit intent pop up comes up only on the pricing page, etc.
Example of a temporary banner from Klue, announcing an acquisitions:
Geolocation and language changes. Do you have global audiences? This makes websites way more complicated, but needs to be dealt with. There’s a lot of ways this can be done, e.g. doing a 1:1 translation of your website vs a completely different message and tone that suits the audience more (if this is a topic you want me to write more about click here to let me know).
Forms, including embedded forms (like from Salesforce or Marketo) or internal forms native to the website.
Security and tracking
GDPR is pretty well known, but you should also aim for CCPA compliance, figure out if you want REcaptcha or Honeypot on your forms (likely: yes).
At minimum you also want Google Analytics. Tag Manager is a step up and is very powerful but honestly very confusing and if your team isn’t going to be able to manage it then don’t stress about it.
Facebook/LinkedIn pixels need to be on every page. An easy way to do this is put it in the header or footer (as long as the header or footer is on every page), but if a page doesn’t have this element, just know it won’t be getting tracked.
Take note of your SSL certificate and when it expires. Marketing might be the person who pays for this, and when you renew sometimes it rolls over automatically and sometimes it doesn’t, it’s important to just be aware of this.
Havign a regular maintenance check-in is also really important to be aware of. If you are working with an agency, make sure this is included in what work they do for you. Some agencies will not offer maintenance like checking plugins are up to date, this will need to be negotiated and you need to know what you need before you start talking to agencies.
User permissions is also something you might want built into your site, e.g. out of your team, who is allowed to publish, who is allowed to change settings, if you have a global team then locking users to their local site and not giving them access to other regions, etc.
Content modules
Having a modular site is a best case scenario, where you can start with a blank page and pull in pre-built modules to customise whatever it is you’re making. But even within modules, you’re going to want some flexibility and you need to include this in your brief. For example:
We can assume this is a content module that consists of body text + CTA in a 3 column arrangement. What if you only want 2 CTAs? Does your CMS allow you to change that? What if you want 4? You might end up with multiple variations of the same module, or have one module that allows you to choose how many you want.
You also might want to be able to change the background colour of the modules, or some other element of modules.
Alongside the screenshots of page types that I recommended at the beginning, keep a collection of screenshots of module styles you like.
Content migration
If you already have a website and need to migrate it over to a new web build, make sure the migration, and any redirects are included in the contract. There will be SEO implications so make sure you negotiate all of this.
A website rebuild is also a good opportunity to fix up or improve any content you think could be better. Combining smaller posts into bigger, better posts, etc, will all require questions like “how do we merge the SEO of 3 pages into 1?”. There’s a lot of methods to do this, but the point here is you need to be having the conversation and be aware it’s a topic that needs to be ticked off your to-do list.
Check off the deliverables at the end of the build
Before you sign off and say the project is complete, pull out your contract and list of deliverables and go through it with a fine tooth comb. Some things get genuinely missed in the chaos of a project this big, and sometimes the agency hopes you don’t notice they didn’t do something.
A final reminder
What good is a state-of-the-art, on-the-cutting-edge-of-technology website, if you can’t use it? Just because a certain tech stack is new and exciting does not always mean it’s right for your use case. Always pick something you can actually use over something shiny.