Check out the site we’ve launched for FocusPTF (Physical Therapy & Fitness). We had a good time putting this one together for our friend, founder Richard Biggers, PT CSCS. He’s promised that nobody at PeakTwo will ever suffer from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.
Standing up this site presented several interesting challenges. FocusPTF serves a range of clients, from people contending with workplace injuries to hardcore athletes looking to maximize physical performance. We needed to respect that audience range, creating a site that was both reassuring for someone recovering from trauma and highly credible for competitive types.
Ongoing interaction with the client throughout the design, development and content creation phases ensured that we produced a site that adhered to our messaging and interaction fundamentals while always respecting Rich’s vision. We think we nailed it.
Rich, between Mike’s quest to break par and Jay’s jiu jitsu tournament prep, you can count on seeing us in the Focus waiting room with some consistency.
Our brains are cloudy from too much coffee and leftover candy. (BTW, drop a Reese’s in to the bottom of your mug before the next fill-up. You’ll thank us.) One thought has managed to bubble through, based on some of our recent site-design consultation.
Quite often, when a client wants to kick off their web presence, they come to us before nary a pixel has been positioned. We get to build it from scratch, and that’s fine by us. In other cases, we’re in damage-control mode. Prospective clients have an existing site that has mutated in to an uncontrollable atrocity. It’s been on the slab too long, with dozens of interested parties chiming in on how it’s supposed to look, what it’s supposed to do, and the messages it’s supposed to communicate.
What we have in that case is a first-class Franken-site. Like Mary Shelley’s monster, it consists of somewhat-viable parts that have been stitched together, bolted on, and assembled with a haphazard urgency that makes the result a nightmare of incongruent content and conflicting functionality.
What’s the cure for such a site? Sometimes you can salvage the guts and start a rebuild. Sometimes it’s best to drive a stake through its proverbial heart and let it die.
Check your site. If you have an immediate, easy sense of what you want a visitor to learn, and what actions you want them to perform, you’re probably in good shape. A good test? Get someone who has never seen the site to click over. If they don’t do what you want within about three to five seconds, you might have a site that’s more monster than masterpiece. Might be time to go back to the lab.
We’re fans of John Jantsch over at Duct Tape Marketing, and today’s post, The 5 Personalities Every Successful Website Must Employ is worth the read for top dogs at companies of any size.
Money quote:
” . . . the business owner turned do-it-yourself web site creator, even armed with a simple site creation tool, almost always lacks the split personality traits required to view the project properly.”
What are those personality components? Strategist, Designer, Developer, User, and Marketer.
Whether you plan to revamp your site yourself, or you’re working with an agency, keeping those five concentrations in mind can be the key to site success. In fact, they’re an ideal means of measuring whether or not your agency is up to snuff. If it seems like they’re lacking in one, they probably won’t deliver the results you deserve.
Definitely worth the read.
