When you’ve spent thousands of pounds on your shiny new corporate brochure, it can be tempting to build your website to look and work just like it. Going down that road will lead to frustrated customers and a website that falls well short of realising its potential.

If you misunderstand the fundamental differences between the web and print your website won’t work for you.  And if you commission an agency who are stuck in the offline world to build an effective website for you, their offline principles will fail both you and your customers on the web.

People consume web content differently to how they consume any other type of information.  They are more impatient.  They scan read.  They can miss entire sections of information.  They are driven by getting their task fulfilled.  And in order to make life easier for your online visitors, there is a key discipline which you must understand and implement.

You must learn how to facilitate your customer’s journey.  This is key to how well they will use your website.  If you consider your company brochure, the majority of your customers will read page 1, then page 2, then page 3, etc.  They consume your information linearly and predictably, and you dictate what information they see, when they see it, and the priority which you give to each item.

On the web you don’t have this luxury.  People come to your website with their own needs and their own priorities and your various customers take lots of different routes through your content dependent on what is important to them.  You are no longer in charge of your content’s priority and you must adopt your content to make sure your customer gets what they want quickly and easily.

A great example of this is how we read news online.  When we watch the six o’clock news, the newsreader starts with the lead story, then the second story and so on.  The length of time spent on each story and the amount of detail which the newsreader goes into has been decided by the editor.  If there is a story which is of special interest to you, you will need to get further information elsewhere.

On the web this is entirely different.  If you look at a good news website, the lead story has been decided by the publisher, but when you view it, along with the story is a range of relevant links.  If it’s a court case, you can read context to the case, reports from previous days in court, a profile of the victim, background on the accused and so on.  A good news website puts the reader in charge, they decide what is important to them, and they decide where they go next.

This is all made possible because someone who has built the news website has facilitated the reader’s journey.  They have put themselves in the reader’s shoes and have asked what is important to the reader at each point in their browsing, and what the most popular and appropriate next steps are.  Links to other stories then become the signposts to help the reader.

Look at the product page on Amazon.  This page, arguably one of the most successful web pages in the history of the web is responsible for turning over millions of pounds of revenue for Amazon.  It will never win a design award.  It will never be nominated for a design award.  But it drives sales.  Because Amazon facilitates the journey.

From the product page on Amazon, there are signposts to allow the reader to buy a new book, buy a second hand book, read other reader reviews, view other books by the same author, add the book to the basket, add the book to a gift list, and see what people who bought this book also bought.  Amazon recognise that their customers have different needs and priorities and that they won’t be hemmed into a buying process they don’t want.  So Amazon allows their customer to make any journey they wish through their website.

On your website, can people get to the information they want quickly and easily?  If they are viewing your products, what might they want to do next?  Can they add to the shopping basket instantly?  Is your contact form readily available?  Do you annoy them with corporate information before they can even get to your products?

Go to your website now.  Think about the things which really matter to your customers.  How easily can they find them?  Don’t give them your corporate brochure.  That’s not good enough any more.  Provide them with a website which gets to the point and lets your customers, not you, decide what is important to them.