Description:
Today Matt talks about identifying the pain points on a website and solving them. Matt is the founder of a web design agency and their whole job is to help a client identify and solve these issues. After defining what pain points are in this context, he provides 7 examples for real world projects he’s been involved with.
Sometimes a problem stems from how a site was coded or designed. Sometimes it’s related to how something specific functions on the site. Other times it could be an issue with a form not converting enough leads or a site constantly crashing or being hacked. Whatever the case, there’s always a solution or roadmap that can be created to improve the situation.
Whether you are a business or an agency/freelancer, this is a valuable episode.. the insights and experience shared may help you avoid some of these issues or at least know what that roadmap could look like to move you into a better place. Enjoy!
THE MEAT OF IT!
- Intro
- When we get a new project, one of the first things we think about is what issues they are having that we need to solve.
- Existing website? What are you unhappy about?
- Definition: “Pain points are persistent problems with a product, service, website or business in general… that impacts their brand, conversions or similar.” It’s impacting something negatively in your business or on your website.
- Pain points are magnified by the size of a sites revenue and other factors like the source.
- A priority for one business isn’t for another.
- We’re in the problem solving business. People don’t come to us when everything is perfect.
- Building Websites, Solving Pain Points.. Examples from the Trenches
- “We rely heavily on Google traffic.. and our site is slow. And Google likes fast sites.”
- It’s not just one thing in this case..
- Start with an audit of the site. And then prioritize.
- Create a roadmap..
- “Our website gets hacked a lot.”
- Keeping the site up to date.
- Security considerations.
- “Our site crashes regularly.”
- Could be a hack related issue?
- Or a lot of other things…
- The learning curve.. audits.
- It’s a holistic process..
- Implementing regular maintenance and routines.
- “We need to improve conversions and generate more leads.”
- How I can help.. even though I don’t ‘sell’ marketing or advertising.
- What could we improve?
- Working with other other agencies, marketers, advertisers.. to help translate their needs.
- “We spend 20k getting our site redesigned and built.. and we hate the design.”
- They now don’t have a budget right now to improve the site..
- Solving an immediate issue.
- And describe a roadmap.
- “It’s difficult to update the content on our website.”
- It’s something we do regardless.. so it’s mostly just reassuring them they’ll get what they need to manage their site and content when we deliver.
- “Every time a developer touches our site, something gets messed up.”
- Why the code is important.
- If someone builds a site for you, make sure you know how they did and they give you what you need to hand it off to other developers…
- A story of a nightmare scenario where, after the site was built, other developers didn’t know how it was built and hacked the site into a bad state of affairs..
- How to avoid this situation. Things we did to help this clients.
- Looking at this from the business and freelancer/agency perspectives..
- Fielding pain points.
- Sometimes a client doesn’t know they have a problem you can solve.
- Recommend things..
- “We rely heavily on Google traffic.. and our site is slow. And Google likes fast sites.”
Check out these related Episodes:
- Episode 60: Matt’s Agency Update – Super Busy! How We Find Time to Build & Launch a New Product
- Episode 49: Virtual Reality: How VR Will Impact Web Design, Web Dev & Businesses.. Already Is!
- Episode 45: Meet Alexandra Spalato – Building Websites Using Headless CMS, Gatsby and More!
