Web Strategy

Website strategy is your gameplan for making your web portal an effective launch pad that connects users with the information they need. It defines your website's role in your business ecosystem and maps the path forward based on user needs and business objectives. Without strategy, websites become digital brochures rather than powerful business tools.

Tip: Before engaging any strategy consultant, clearly define what business problems you want your website to solve.

Strategy comes first and focuses on the 'why' and 'what' - why the website exists, what it should accomplish, and what users need. Design follows strategy and addresses the 'how' - how to present information, how users navigate, and how it looks. The Experience Thinking approach emphasizes starting with the intended experience before jumping into visual design or functionality.

Tip: Insist on seeing the strategic foundation before reviewing any design concepts to ensure form follows function.

Website strategy addresses problems like poor user engagement, unclear value proposition, disconnected customer journeys, ineffective lead generation, and misaligned business goals. It helps transform websites from static information repositories into dynamic tools that support your complete business strategy and user experience lifecycle.

Tip: Document your current website challenges with specific examples and metrics to help strategists understand the scope of problems to address.

Evaluate whether your website helps users accomplish their goals efficiently and supports your business objectives measurably. Look at user behavior data, conversion rates, and feedback to assess strategy effectiveness. The Experience Thinking framework suggests examining how well your website connects with your brand, content, product, and service experiences.

Tip: Create a simple scorecard rating how well your website currently serves different user types and business goals.

Web strategy focuses specifically on your website's role and effectiveness, while digital strategy encompasses all digital touchpoints and channels. Web strategy is often a component of broader digital strategy, defining how your website integrates with other digital experiences and supports overall business objectives.

Tip: Clarify the scope of strategy work upfront - whether you need website-specific guidance or broader digital ecosystem planning.

Absolutely. Website strategy should directly support your business objectives and integrate with your operational processes. The best web strategies create seamless connections between digital interactions and real-world business activities, ensuring your website advances rather than operates independently of your core business goals.

Tip: Share your business plan and key objectives with your strategy team to ensure website strategy supports broader organizational success.

Review strategy annually or when significant business changes occur. Minor adjustments might be needed quarterly based on user feedback and performance data. Major strategy overhauls typically happen every 2-3 years as markets, technologies, and user expectations evolve. Regular review ensures your strategy remains relevant and effective.

Tip: Schedule quarterly strategy check-ins to review performance metrics and identify emerging opportunities or challenges.

We use research methods like user interviews, surveys, analytics analysis, and behavioral observation to understand user goals, challenges, and expectations. The Experience Thinking approach recognizes that users play different roles - customers, users, and clients - throughout their lifecycle, each with distinct needs and motivations.

Tip: Start by listing your assumptions about user needs, then test these assumptions through direct user feedback before finalizing strategy.

Users often express solutions rather than underlying problems. They might request specific features while the real need is accomplishing a task more efficiently. Good strategy research uncovers the jobs users are trying to do and the obstacles they face, rather than just collecting feature requests.

Tip: Ask users to describe their current process and frustrations rather than asking what features they want added to your website.

We prioritize based on business impact, user volume, and strategic importance. Sometimes different user needs can be addressed through different pathways or sections. The Experience Thinking lifecycle approach helps identify which user roles are most critical to business success and deserve priority attention.

Tip: Create a simple matrix ranking different user groups by business value and volume to guide prioritization decisions.

The answer depends on your business goals and growth strategy. Often the best approach serves current users exceptionally well while removing barriers that prevent new users from engaging. Understanding your user experience lifecycle helps identify opportunities to better serve existing users and attract similar new ones.

Tip: Analyze your current user data to understand which segments provide the highest business value, then optimize for those patterns.

We study people who have similar problems or use alternative solutions, even if they're not your users yet. We examine analogous experiences and validate assumptions through prototype testing and concept validation. The key is understanding the problems you're solving rather than just the solutions you're proposing.

Tip: Interview people who currently solve the problem your new service addresses, even if they use completely different methods or tools.

Personas help teams stay focused on real user needs rather than internal assumptions. They represent user goals, behaviors, and contexts that inform strategic decisions. However, personas should be based on research data, not marketing demographics. They're tools for alignment, not targets for marketing messages.

Tip: Validate any existing personas with recent user research, or create new ones based on actual user behavior data rather than assumptions.

Strategy should accommodate the full range of user capabilities while not penalizing more capable users. We design for the least capable users in critical areas while providing advanced options for power users. Understanding your user distribution helps inform where to focus accessibility and simplicity efforts.

Tip: Test your current website with users who represent your least technical audience to identify barriers that might be invisible to your team.

Content strategy determines what information goes where and why, supporting the broader website strategy goals. In the Experience Thinking framework, content is one of four connected experience areas that must work together cohesively. Content strategy follows a create-review-revise pattern and typically follows product and service experience creation.

Tip: Map your most important user tasks to the content they need at each step to ensure content strategy supports user goals.

Content strategy defines the framework - what content is needed, how it's organized, who creates it, and how it's maintained. Content creation is the actual writing and production work. Strategy establishes the governance framework, processes, and guidelines that guide ongoing content creation and management.

Tip: Establish content strategy and governance processes before investing heavily in content creation to avoid rework and inconsistency.

We evaluate content based on user context, task urgency, and information depth. Website content typically serves users who are actively seeking information or trying to complete tasks. Content strategy considers the entire experience ecosystem and assigns content to channels where it's most useful and accessible.

Tip: Audit your current content by user task - move task-critical information to your website and consider other channels for promotional or supplementary content.

Content governance establishes processes for creating, reviewing, updating, and archiving content. It prevents websites from becoming digital archives filled with outdated information. Good governance includes retention policies, update schedules, quality standards, and clear ownership responsibilities for different content types.

Tip: Assign specific content ownership to team members with clear expectations about review frequency and update responsibilities.

Content migration involves auditing existing content, identifying what's still valuable, and determining what needs updating or replacement. We evaluate content based on user needs, accuracy, and strategic value rather than just moving everything forward. Migration is an opportunity to improve content quality and organization.

Tip: Use content migration as a chance to eliminate outdated information - only migrate content that still serves current user needs and business goals.

SEO should inform content strategy without driving it. Good content that serves users well typically performs better in search results than content written primarily for search engines. We integrate SEO best practices into content that prioritizes user experience and business objectives first.

Tip: Focus on creating content that answers your users' actual questions thoroughly - this approach often improves search performance naturally.

Content governance frameworks include review schedules, update assignments, and quality control processes. We establish content lifecycle management that treats information as a living asset requiring ongoing attention. Different content types need different maintenance approaches based on how quickly they become outdated.

Tip: Create a content calendar that includes both creation and review dates to ensure information accuracy doesn't degrade over time.

We start by understanding your business objectives, target outcomes, and success metrics. Website strategy should create measurable pathways to business results through improved user experiences. We align website capabilities with business processes and ensure digital interactions support real-world business activities and relationships.

Tip: Define specific business outcomes you want your website to influence, then track these metrics to measure strategy effectiveness.

Website strategy should be flexible enough to adapt to business evolution while maintaining core user value. We focus on understanding stable user needs and creating adaptable structures that can accommodate business model changes. The strategy establishes principles and frameworks rather than rigid specifications.

Tip: Identify the aspects of your business that are most likely to remain stable and build website strategy around those foundational elements.

Website strategy should seamlessly integrate with your sales funnel, providing the right information at appropriate stages and facilitating smooth transitions to human interaction. We map the customer journey from awareness through decision-making and identify where website interactions can support or improve the sales process.

Tip: Document your current sales process and identify where prospects typically have questions or need information that your website could provide more effectively.

Absolutely. Strategy must be sustainable for your team to implement and maintain. We consider your content creation capacity, technical skills, and available resources when developing strategic recommendations. The best strategy is one your team can execute consistently over time.

Tip: Honestly assess your team's capacity for website maintenance and content creation when evaluating strategic recommendations.

We establish baseline metrics before strategy implementation and track improvements in user engagement, conversion rates, customer satisfaction, and business outcomes. Success measurement should connect website performance to business results, not just digital metrics. Regular review helps identify what's working and what needs adjustment.

Tip: Set up tracking for business metrics like lead quality, customer acquisition cost, and customer lifetime value to measure strategy success beyond website analytics.

Best practices provide starting points, but strategy should be customized for your specific context, users, and business model. We use proven principles while adapting approaches to your unique situation. Sometimes industry-specific or business model-specific solutions work better than generic best practices.

Tip: Be clear about what makes your business or users unique so strategists can adapt recommendations appropriately rather than applying generic solutions.

Strategy should accommodate predictable business patterns while maintaining year-round user value. We consider how user needs change throughout your business cycle and ensure the website remains useful during different periods. This might involve adaptive content, flexible features, or seasonal optimization strategies.

Tip: Map your annual business patterns and user behavior changes to identify when different website features or content types are most important.

Strategy projects typically include discovery research, stakeholder alignment, user needs analysis, competitive assessment, and strategic recommendations with implementation roadmaps. We use the Experience Thinking approach to examine how your website should connect with brand, content, product, and service experiences. The process is collaborative and evidence-based.

Tip: Ask for a detailed project timeline showing when you'll need to provide input versus when you'll receive deliverables to plan your team's involvement appropriately.

Most strategy projects take 6-10 weeks depending on complexity, stakeholder availability, and research requirements. The timeline includes discovery, analysis, strategy development, and stakeholder alignment. Rushing strategy development often leads to surface-level recommendations that don't address underlying issues effectively.

Tip: Plan for strategy development to take longer than you initially expect - thorough strategy work requires time for research, analysis, and stakeholder input.

We need access to key stakeholders, business objectives, user data, and current performance metrics. Your team's market knowledge and customer insights are valuable for understanding context and validating strategic directions. We balance external research with internal expertise to develop grounded recommendations.

Tip: Designate a primary point of contact who can coordinate team input and make decisions to keep the strategy process moving efficiently.

We facilitate stakeholder alignment through structured workshops and evidence-based discussions. The Experience Thinking approach helps gather representatives responsible for each experience area around the same table to clarify roles and ensure shared understanding. User research data helps resolve conflicts by focusing on external user needs rather than internal preferences.

Tip: Identify key decision-makers early and ensure they're available for critical strategy discussions to prevent delays and conflicting direction.

Typical deliverables include strategic recommendations, user needs analysis, content strategy framework, implementation roadmap, and success metrics. The specific format depends on your needs, but should include actionable guidance your team can follow. Good strategy deliverables serve as ongoing reference documents, not just final presentations.

Tip: Request strategy deliverables in formats your team can easily reference and share - detailed documentation is often more valuable than presentation slides.

We test strategic concepts through user feedback, stakeholder review, and small-scale pilots when possible. Validation helps identify potential issues before full implementation and builds confidence in strategic direction. The approach varies based on project scope and timeline, but always includes some form of external validation.

Tip: Ask for opportunities to test key strategic concepts with actual users before committing to full implementation to reduce risk and improve outcomes.

Strategy development should include implementation planning and ongoing support options. We provide roadmaps for executing strategic recommendations and can offer guidance during implementation phases. Good strategy work establishes frameworks for making future decisions, not just immediate action items.

Tip: Plan for implementation support during strategy development - having strategic guidance available during execution prevents misinterpretation of recommendations.

Competitive analysis helps identify market opportunities and user expectations while avoiding copy-cat approaches. We study what competitors do well and poorly to inform strategic positioning. The goal is understanding the competitive landscape to create distinctive value, not replicating what others are doing.

Tip: Include both direct competitors and companies that solve similar user problems in different industries to get broader perspective on user expectations.

The best approach combines meeting user expectations with distinctive positioning. Users expect certain standard features and information, but differentiation comes from how you deliver unique value. Strategy should address table stakes while highlighting what makes your organization special.

Tip: Map competitor features into 'must-have' versus 'nice-to-have' categories to focus differentiation efforts on features that matter most to users.

We evaluate competitors from user perspectives through task-based analysis, user experience reviews, and performance assessment. We also consider business model differences and market positioning. The analysis focuses on user experience quality and business effectiveness, not just visual design.

Tip: Try completing important user tasks on competitor websites yourself to identify both positive experiences you might learn from and problems you can avoid.

We expand analysis to include indirect competitors, alternative solutions, and analogous experiences from other industries. Users often compare experiences across different contexts, so understanding broader experience expectations helps inform strategy even in niche markets.

Tip: Identify what alternatives your users currently use to solve the problems your service addresses, even if they're not direct competitors.

Market leaders have the opportunity to set user expectations and industry standards. Strategy focuses on maintaining competitive advantages while continuing to innovate and improve user experience. We analyze emerging competitors and changing user expectations to ensure continued leadership.

Tip: As a market leader, study emerging competitors and adjacent industries that might disrupt your market position to stay ahead of changes.

Yes, strategy should be resilient against foreseeable competitive changes while remaining adaptable to unexpected disruptions. We consider technology trends, market evolution, and changing user expectations that might affect competitive positioning. Future-focused strategy helps maintain relevance over time.

Tip: Monitor industry trends and user behavior changes that might signal new competitive threats or opportunities for advantage.

We focus on understanding user needs that competitors aren't serving well and developing distinctive approaches to address those gaps. Positioning comes from unique value delivery rather than feature comparison. The Experience Thinking framework helps identify opportunities across brand, content, product, and service dimensions.

Tip: Focus on understanding what users struggle with when using competitor solutions, then develop your strategy to address those specific pain points better.

We prioritize based on user impact, business value, implementation complexity, and resource requirements. Quick wins that improve user experience with minimal effort often come first, followed by more complex strategic initiatives. The implementation roadmap balances immediate improvements with long-term strategic goals.

Tip: Focus on implementing changes that improve your most important user tasks first, even if they're not the most visible improvements.

Good strategy includes phased implementation that works within resource constraints. We identify which elements are foundational and which can be added later. The key is maintaining strategic coherence while spreading implementation across manageable phases. Some improvements can be made immediately while others require more planning and resources.

Tip: Be realistic about your implementation capacity and ask for a phased approach that allows you to make steady progress without overwhelming your team.

Implementation success requires clear ownership, realistic timelines, and regular progress reviews. We provide detailed roadmaps with specific milestones and success criteria. Regular check-ins help identify obstacles early and adjust approaches as needed. Implementation is often more complex than strategy development.

Tip: Assign specific team members to own different aspects of implementation and schedule regular progress reviews to maintain momentum.

Support options vary but often include implementation guidance, design reviews, and strategic consultation during execution. We can help interpret strategic recommendations in specific situations and provide feedback on implementation approaches. Ongoing support helps ensure strategic intent is maintained throughout execution.

Tip: Plan for implementation support during strategy development rather than assuming you can execute independently - having strategic guidance available prevents costly mistakes.

We establish success metrics during strategy development and track progress against baseline measurements. This includes both user experience indicators and business performance metrics. Regular measurement helps identify what's working well and what needs adjustment. Success measurement should connect to the original strategic objectives.

Tip: Set up measurement systems before implementation begins so you can track progress and identify issues early rather than waiting until completion.

Good implementation includes feedback loops that allow for strategic adjustment based on real-world results. Strategy should be a living framework that evolves based on user response and business outcomes. We distinguish between implementation challenges and strategic issues to make appropriate adjustments.

Tip: Plan for strategy refinement during implementation - early user feedback often reveals opportunities to improve strategic approaches.

Scope changes are common as implementation reveals new insights or requirements. We evaluate changes against strategic objectives to determine if they support or detract from the overall strategy. Some changes strengthen strategic outcomes while others might be scope creep that dilutes focus.

Tip: Establish clear criteria for evaluating scope changes based on strategic objectives rather than making ad-hoc decisions that might compromise the overall strategy.