Before a site is built, the business has to decide what it is for. There are two starting points, and they lead to different products.
The first: a company presence
The site exists to establish the company online, or to serve as a product brochure, often because competitors have one and the business does not want to be left behind.
Understood this way, the site is a printed brochure that happens to be digital, except that the comparison flatters the website. A printed brochure has to be redesigned, reprinted and redistributed every time a product changes. On a site, adding and modifying information is trivial, which is the whole advantage.
A competent developer designs for that use: everything the client will plausibly need to change is made easy to change. News can be added, products can be added, enquiries can be managed. The operating experience is designed rather than discovered, and training is included so the client can run the site without calling anyone.
For a site at this stage, much of the traffic arrives from a business card, which is worth knowing before commissioning expensive promotional work.
The second: a marketing foundation
The site exists to promote the product, which makes it the base for everything else the business does online. Most companies building a site today are in this group, and the old marketing methods no longer carry the weight they did.
The often-quoted line is that the twenty-first century will see either online marketing or no marketing at all. It is an absolute statement about a trend that is real, and traditional businesses have been scrambling to build online marketing teams in response.
The first step in that is a site built for the purpose, which raises the requirement on the developer. Design has to go beyond looking good: the emphasis is on user experience in the browsing, the interaction and the emotional register, all of it.
Then the technical work: code optimisation, meta tag optimisation, content optimisation. Then the promotion, which is both the company image and the product, run across the channels that suit the sector. Blog promotion, forum promotion, question-and-answer platforms and information-platform listings are the common ones, and paid online advertising is another.
A developer who can plan that systematically is doing something different from a developer who can design a page. The first one is what a marketing site needs.
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