The Rooms Your Website Has

You furnished your physical space on purpose. The sign, the paint, the chairs in the waiting area, the weight of the paper your quotes are printed on. Those were decisions, and you made them because the places customers meet you should look like a business worth trusting.

You have made decisions about the digital side too. The website, the Google listing, the social profiles. Most owners we work with have opinions here, often quite specific ones, and sometimes a folder of sites they like and a clear sense of which competitor's looks cheap.

So the thing that tends to be missing is not intent, and it is not taste. It is vocabulary, and the confidence that comes with it.

Think about how much you already know about physical spaces without ever having studied one. A restaurant has a bar, a dining room, a pass, a prep station, and you know roughly why each exists and what happens when one is in the wrong place. A professional office has a front, a waiting area, and rooms where the actual work happens. Nobody taught you that. It is convention, absorbed over a lifetime of walking into buildings, and it is centuries deep.

Websites have no such tradition. There are parallels, which is why this series uses them, but a website is genuinely a different animal. Most people have never been given names for its parts, and it is hard to ask for something you cannot point at, or to judge whether you got it.

That is all this series is for. We are going to walk through five jobs a website has to do, using the office as a way of thinking about them.

A quick note on that, because metaphors can mislead. There is no page called the lobby. These are borrowed names for jobs, not a sitemap, and nobody should finish this series and go looking for a reception area in their navigation.

There is the sign, which is how people find you at all. There is the lobby, the first impression that decides whether someone stays. There is the consultation, the conversation that works out whether you and a customer are a fit. There is the receptionist, which is everything that happens between someone getting in touch and someone in your business dealing with it. And there is the follow-through, the part that happens after, which is where good businesses quietly separate themselves from adequate ones.

The other reason to name them is that the distance between a capable go at it and a professional result is wider online than it is in a physical space, and it is worth being honest about why.

Could you furnish your own waiting room? Almost certainly. With some care and a few reference images you would get most of the way there, and the gap between your version and a designer's would be modest. The work is mostly selecting and arranging things you can see, and you get immediate feedback on every choice. If the chair is wrong, you can tell.

The same care aimed at a website lands further from the mark. Part of that is application: your colours were chosen on purpose, and then they have to hold up on a screen, at several sizes, against light and dark, next to photography. The larger part is that much of what separates an adequate site from a good one is not visual at all, so there is nothing to look at while it is going wrong. Most people hire someone for their restaurant interior even though they could have a go themselves. Online, the case for that is stronger rather than weaker.

The obvious question now is whether the tools have changed this, and they have changed some of it. Generating a page that looks credible is genuinely easy today, and we have written separately about what that does and does not get you. The short version is that the visible half has got much cheaper and the invisible half has not moved, and the invisible half is what this series is about.

So each piece here does one plain job. It describes one room, what it is for, roughly what it takes to furnish, and what changes in the business when it works. There is no pitch at the end, because the pitch would be premature. First the thing needs a name you can use.

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The Digital Office series. Five jobs a website has to do, named after the parts of a building they resemble.

• Anchor: The rooms your website has
• The sign: how people find you at all
• The lobby: your homepage is a first impression
• The consultation: are we a fit?
• The receptionist: what happens after someone fills in your form
• The follow-through: the part that happens after