#23: Plan Your Website Like a Pro: Strategy Before Design

🚨 Before you design your homepage, choose a template, or hire a developer—watch this. Most websites fail not because they look bad—but because they were built without a plan.

In this video, I walk you through The Website Compass, a strategy framework that helps you get clear on your website’s mission, goals, and purpose—so your website actually works for your organization.

Whether you're a small business owner, creative entrepreneur, church, or nonprofit, this strategy-first approach will help you build a site with direction and purpose—not just guesswork.

To schedule a call with me, visit https://ritchey-creative.com/meet

Let’s stay connected: 

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• Facebook - @ritcheycreative

⬇️ More stuff you should check out ⬇️

🔗 Blueprint for the Perfect Website (Free PDF)
https://ritchey-creative.com/blueprint

🚀 Work With Us!
If you're a business owner, church pastor, or non-profit leader ready to start maximizing your impact online and are ready to take the next step, we'd love to work with you!
https://ritchey-creative.com

Transcript

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you wouldn't go on a road trip without first properly planning for that road trip making sure you know exactly where you're going when you're going to get there and you're going to have some sort of tool to help you get there some sort of navigation tool a map a GPS a compass and the same is true for your website strategy if you're actually wanting to see a website that's not just pretty but actually gets results it starts with the planning process before you actually hop into Squarespace or WordPress or Wix or hire a designer to build a website for you you first need to answer a series of questions and so this initial planning process we call it mission so we have a four-part framework here at Richie Creative that we use to build every single website that we build called the website strategy roadmap it consists of mission and messaging and marketing and meaningful experiences and so today we're going to hop into this mission component if you want a overview of the entire website strategy roadmap framework uh we have another video that we posted recently it's a 60-minute uh training video it basically covers the entirety of the framework the entirety of the website strategy roadmap so you can check that out as well but for mission this is the compass this is the thing that is your navigation tool that before you even think about messaging before you think about marketing before you think about the experiences that your website audience is going to have on your website you first need to identify where are we going where are we headed what direction should we take things in and so we use uh a tool that we like to call the website strategy compass it's essentially broken into four parts the four parts are passion and purpose setting goals tracking goals and course correcting over time so in this video we're going to be unpacking the website strategy compass again this is all part of the mission part of the website strategy roadmap uh the planning phase before we get into anything else before we hop into WordPress or Squarespace or Wix or whatever CMS you're using you want to make sure that you're planning for your website appropriately[Music] hey if you're new to the channel my name is Brandon i own Richie Creative which is a creative agency that leverages intentional creative services to help churches reach new people and to help nonprofits more readily help the hurting and to help uh small businesses to more effectively and more smoothly solve their customers problems uh hopefully this uh video is beneficial to you feel free to check out the rest of the channel we have lots of great free resources and training videos uh that again hopefully can help you to do more good as well okay so let's go ahead and hop into the website strategy compass this is going to be broken into four different parts part number one passionate purpose part number two setting goals for your website part number three tracking those goals and then part number four course correcting over time so let's talk about passionate purpose first off this is not your mission statement this is not your vision statement this might not even show up anywhere on your website but this is the statement uh that is going to basically be pointing you toward true north for your organization and for your website uh so you can use it as a filter so once it's established you can be thinking through is writing this blog post for our website actually going to help us to be propelled in the direction of our passion and purpose or hey adding these prices to our website or making these changes or adding this section or formatting our pages this certain way is it going to actually help us to achieve what we're wanting to achieve on our website so again it can be a filter it can be something that points you in the right direction as you're building out messaging and copy and all the rest uh for your website strategy so for passionate purpose what you're really trying to identify is what is the purpose of this website that is bigger than the task at hand for instance if you're a pressure washing company your passionate purpose isn't that you're just pressure washing houses but that you're pressure washing houses so that people can get back to enjoying the home that they love that's something that is going to elicit an emotional response from a client but it's also something that your team can rally behind it's something that you can rally behind i'll tell you this our creative agency does a lot of different things we offer branding services and website strategy and website design and recurring monthly graphic design subscriptions but if we were just pumping out logos and pumping out websites I would be burnt out my team would be burnt out but the fact that we are helping our people whether they're churches or nonprofits or businesses that we're helping them do more good and actually make a difference in the world that's something that puts fresh wind in our sales and is a big part of our passionate purpose so I have three examples of passionate purpose four websites uh that I can show you these are fictitious i just made these up uh so there's one for a business there's one for a nonprofit and there's one for a church so for the business example Tracy's mobile pet grooming service so the passion of purpose for the website might be our business's website is a tool that helps us bring pet grooming services to the homes of our clients so that busy families can get their time back so in this example for Tracy's mobile pet grooming service it's not just about grooming dogs it's about something that's deeper uh they're solving their customers problems in a really effective uh and smooth way and that's something that Tracy her team and her clients can all get behind and it's going to guide the website and it's going to help them to make really really good informed decisions uh for their website over time all right let's go to our nonprofit example so uh a fictitious organization called Daybrite Mentoring Center our nonprofit's website is a tool that connects the youth of our community with certified mentors that can invest in the future and help them live lives of meaning uh so again they're not just mentoring people but here's why they're mentoring people so it's really that why what's the why for your website what's the why for your organization okay for a church this is for a fictitious church called Palm Brook Baptist Church our church's website is a tool that helps our church members connect deeply with one another in fellowship through events and small groups and provides a clear path for new visitors to be warmly acclimated into the life of our church so again we're not just singing songs on Sunday morning we're not just meeting together just to meet together but here's why we're doing it so think of the passion of purpose as the big why for your organization and for your website this might be similar to a vision statement or a mission statement or something like that but it doesn't have to be and again this isn't necessarily a statement that's going to be written on the homepage of your website but it's something that's acting as a compass to help point your website in the right direction to make sure that the decisions that you're making around your website are actually the ones that are going to help propel you in the direction uh that you want to go with your website and with your organization so again the website strategy compass we have passion purpose and then the next step here is setting goals now you don't want to just set any goals you want to set smart goals and by the way in case you don't remember a smart goal is one that is specific it's measurable it's achievable it's relevant and it's time bound or timebased uh and so here's an example of a goal that is not a smart goal so a non-smart goal might say I want to lose 15 pounds but a smart goal version of that would be I will exercise for 30 minutes on Mondays Wednesdays and Fridays and strive for a caloric deficit of 500 calories per day in order to lose 15 pounds by March 1st so it hits all the criteria it is specific it's measurable it's achievable it's relevant and it's time bound or time based and so for your website as you're setting goals for your website you want to make sure that these are smart goals as well so what are some metrics that you might actually set goals around for your website and by the way why do you need to set goals for your website anyways in the first place zig Ziggler has a quote that I absolutely love he says "If you aim at nothing you'll hit it every time." And that's the truth if you don't know actually what you're trying to do and what direction you're wanting to take things in how are you going to know when you have success or when you have failure and so we want to make sure that we're actually setting specific smart goals for our website um as part of the website strategy compass we've talked about passionate purpose now we're talking about goal setting so what are things that you actually might want to set goals for for your website this could be anything from page visits to page clicks to downloads of free PDF resources that you might have on your website to leads that you're acquiring to sales that you might be making if you're a nonprofit maybe it's the amount of donations that you're making in a specific week or month or quarter um or if you're a church maybe it's how many plan visit forms people are actually filling out on the plan of visit page of your church website regardless there are a lot of different categories that you might set website specific goals for but make sure that as you're setting goals they are smart goals so again with the uh website strategy compass we have passion and purpose we have setting goals the third component here is tracking goals so we need to measure it how are you going to actually know if you actually have success or failure well you need to be tracking things and so there's a lot of different ways to do this um one of the most intuitive ways would be to look at your website statistics for instance if you're building your website in WordPress or if you want to build your website in WordPress you can install a plugin called Jetack and there's other ones as well but Jetack will show you what's your total traffic over a specific week or month or quarter what pages are people visiting what buttons are they clicking so this is a really good way to track some of those different goals and if you have a Squarespace website Squarespace has a great analytics dashboard which can also show you all of those different analytics and statistics uh related to page counts and page visits and traffic uh but you might also be using tools like Mailchimp or Mailorite or ConvertKit or any of your different email marketing tools to see how many emails how many leads are we capturing from people downloading forms on our website or filling out contact forms etc uh so there's a lot of different tools you can use what I would say is once you figure out what are the tools that you're actually going to be using to track some of this progress uh whether it is your email marketing campaign or it's just the analytics tool in your website whether it's WordPress or Squarespace or something else um you could put all of that into a spreadsheet and you can manually be updating it uh to kind of see where are we at are we hitting our goals are we not hitting our goals uh or you could um subscribe to a service that actually is like a dashboard um these are usually called like KPI dashboards key performance indicator is what KPI stands for and your KPI dashboard at a glance can basically connect to all of these different services and sort of show you a snapshot of where are you at in terms of the goal that you set are you close are you not close which ones are we kind of lagging behind in uh but again it's important to set goals for your website but it's useless if you're setting goals and you're not actually tracking goals and measuring goals over time okay so with the website strategy compass we've talked about passionate purpose and setting goals and tracking goals but the final component is course correcting this is what I like to call the 90-day bottleneck check and so every 90 days or every quarter or every three months look at your goals and see which ones are we really succeeding in and which goals are we just kind of not hitting and then course correct do you need to adjust your goal do you need to adjust the metric uh do you need to figure out a different goal if this goal is kind of unrealistic so again use the filter of smart s is it specific enough is it measurable is it achievable is it relevant is it time bound uh and then you might need to just change that goal or add a different goal um so again goals can be something that are not set in stone but you can kind of massage them and change them uh and optimize them over time to actually make it specific for your organization and for you're actually wanting to achieve uh on your website one of the biggest website mistakes that businesses churches nonprofits make is they start designing right away they hop in there they start putting in copy they start putting in their logo adding photos changing colors all of this stuff before they actually think through things like what's the passion and purpose what are the goals that we're trying to achieve with our website how are we going to track those goals and what's our plan for course correcting over time so again we always use the website strategy compass as a lens in this initial planning phase before we even start thinking about messaging marketing or meaningful experiences hey if you could benefit from a one-page summary of pretty much everything we covered in this video and more uh we have a one-page PDF resource I'd love to send over to you it's called the website strategy compass checklist it's essentially a checklist of pretty much everything we cover here um and you can use it again in the initial planning phases of your website strategy and then also as a filter as you're making decisions for your website later down the road i would love to send it to you you can uh just send an email to design richchy-creative.com and you can either put in the body or in the subject line website strategy compass checklist and we'd love to send that over to you again it's just a free PDF resource uh that we'd love to put in your hands that hopefully could be a good tool in the initial planning phase or to use as a lens or a filter uh for website decisions down the road well hopefully this video was beneficial and helpful uh for you and your organization whether you are a church a nonprofit or a business remember you can't use up creativity the more you use the more you have