TEARDOWN: WEBSITES
Most websites are designed by committee, built for the company, not the customer. They explain what the business does instead of what the visitor needs. The result: high bounce rates, low conversions, and invisible ROI.
The first question in any website project should be: what does the person visiting this page need to believe, understand, or feel in order to take action?
Instead, most websites answer: what do we want to tell people about ourselves? This produces 'About Us' sections nobody reads, service lists that describe categories instead of outcomes, and homepages that function as corporate brochures rather than conversion tools.
A website designed for the visitor starts with their problem, not your solution. It answers the question they came with. It guides them to action. It does not require them to decode your industry jargon to understand if you can help them.
Committee-designed websites are the product of multiple stakeholders with conflicting priorities. The CEO wants to highlight the company history. The sales team wants to list every service. The marketing team wants to optimize for keywords. The designer wants to win an award.
The result is a website that satisfies everyone internally and persuades no one externally. Every section exists because someone demanded it. No section exists because a visitor needs it.
The best websites are designed by someone with the authority to say no. No to the CEO's biography on the homepage. No to the twenty-item navigation menu. No to the rotating carousel that nobody watches past the first slide.
SEO has become a game of algorithm manipulation. Keywords stuffed into headers. Thin content expanded to hit word counts. Backlink schemes disguised as guest posting. The websites that win at this game are often the ones that real humans find least useful.
The irony: search engines now prioritize the same things humans do — relevance, depth, usefulness. The websites that are genuinely useful to visitors are increasingly the ones that rank well. But most businesses are still playing the old game, optimizing for robots that no longer exist while repelling the humans who do.
Every form field is a barrier. Every navigation option is a distraction. Every pop-up is an interruption. Every page load delay is a lost visitor.
Most websites add friction at every step of the journey. Contact forms with 8 fields. Phone numbers that require hunting through the footer. Pricing that requires a 'request a quote' submission. Appointment booking that requires creating an account.
The businesses that convert best have learned that every unnecessary step costs customers. The ones that don't convert have never measured the cost of their own friction.