You’re starting a new business. Great! You’ve been through months, if not years of planning & logistics. The energy & excitement is pulsing through your veins. You’ve got so much to tell the world about your business and what makes it great.

It’s time to build your website.

You make the single biggest mistake made in website production (and perhaps in marketing in general).

You think about what YOU WANT TO SAY – not what your AUDIENCE WANT AND NEED TO KNOW.

Case in point – the website for a new favourite hangout of mine – The Old Train Station Pub.

Without much thought most marketing professionals would tell you the five questions most likely to be on the mind of a visitor to such a website:

1. Where are you (address)
2. How do I get there (map)
3. When are you open (hours of operation)
4. What do you serve (menus)
5. How do I contact you with other questions, such as booking for a large group (contact info & form)

Anything else really has to be considered secondary. That’s not to say there is no point in publishing it. There will be a small portion of visitors interested in such background information. But you don’t serve garnish without the rest of the meal.

Answering only one of the questions above is more likely to annoy visitors to the site than anything else.

A few years ago I worked with a large public sector organization on the Information Architecture of their IT intranet.

The existing intranet had a home page with 50+ links on it. It had been structured like a document filing system. If you knew you wanted the page titled ‘How to set up an IMAP account in Outlook 2003′ you could probably find it within 4 or 5 clicks. But the majority of visitors didn’t know that was what they needed to do. They knew they had a shiny new laptop on their desk and were about to start 3 months of remote working.

By conducting surveys, reviewing help desk call logs and looking at analytics we were able to work out that approx. 95% of enquiries could be categorized in one of three ways – ‘I need assistance with a hardware issue; I need assistance with a software issue; Somebody is leaving/joining our department’. Add an ‘other issues’ to that and we were able to create a new intranet structure with only 4 home page links – and a much more user centric structure behind it. Use of the intranet increased. The volume of calls to the help desk dropped. Everyone was happy.

The lesson? Simple. When planning a website – you absolutely need to think about what your goals are as a business and how you want to position yourselves – but you then need to set that aside and think about your audiences: who are they; what questions are on their mind; what information do we need to provide to answer those questions.

Only then should you be thinking about design & development.