The Web
The web offers tantalizing freedom to a storyteller.
It invites us to fill a blank canvas. We choose a look and a feel. A voice and a tone. Messages and information. Images, video, sounds. The web equips us to share any single body of work in infinite ways.
To use this freedom wisely, my partners and I define their site’s purpose. How, specifically, can your website support your work? What will your people know, feel, and do after they visit your site?
We build answers informed by the factors that define your success: what you do, your vision and plan, your needs, opportunities, niche, audience, and brand. As we develop your site’s structure, navigation, copy, and design, clear purpose guides every decision we make.
When it's built on a thoughtfully considered, well-articulated purpose that lives and breathes inside each pixel you share, your website delivers.
Q: What’s this work?
A: Supporting partners who want to share their work on the web as part of a thoughtful strategy to support that work in specific ways.
Q: Who’s it for?
A: For people, organizations, and small businesses whose work can benefit in specific ways from a carefully built website.
Q: How does it happen?
A: My team and I learn about your work and how your site can support its success. I propose a plan, and you refine it.
Clarity about participants and roles is essential. You decide how you (and your team if you have one) will participate. I lead the web development team, which includes a designer (who you and I select together), a project manager, and a copywriter.
We establish and commit to a timeline and to clear communication from project launch to site launch. We articulate exactly what your site will achieve. This guides the rest of the project, including structure, content, voice, and design.
Q: What do you mean by a website’s purpose?
A: An effective website supports strategies developed in a thoughtful plan for an organization or for a body of work. My partners have built websites to:
-
Clarify the value of their work
-
Attract customers, clients, donors, and investors
-
Mark a new era
-
Announce an initiative
-
Convey expertise and professionalism
-
Build community
-
Strengthen a movement
-
Advocate for a public policy outcome
Q: How can a plan and a brand help a website succeed?
A: Plans and brands strengthen websites and streamline their development.
Plans (like a business plan, strategic plan, or even a less formal articulation of goals, objectives, results, and success) can provide tested answers to important questions that guide the development of effective websites – questions about your work, the context in which you do it, your vision for success, your path toward it, and more. This provides valuable insight on the role of your website in the success of your work.
Meanwhile a well-developed brand articulates the identity your site will convey. And the process that created it likely clarifies essential facts about your people and why they support you. This answers many questions essential in web development, including: design, narrative approach, voice, tone, and more.
Q: Our website has to sound like us, not like you. . .
A: Absolutely: every word on your site must sing in the voice that resonates with your people. An important part of this process is to find examples of that voice, articulate its defining features, and use them to guide copywriting.