Making boring websites again.
A website that WOW doesn’t sell. What if you were making a boring website to please your users and your business instead?
Swiss army knives are great. They have many features that will solve all your outdoor problems. You need to cut fruits, no problem. A piece of wood, easy peasy. They are great when you explore the beauty of nature.
But have you ever seen a chef use one in a restaurant? Do you even use one recently?
It’s not because a knife can technically have more features than it should. Adding more blades to your knife will make it fastidious to use.
And guess what? The same applies to websites!
Is your website a Swiss army knife?
What is the primary function of your website?
This simple question often gets complex answers from clients. Over the past year, the role of a website has expanded significantly. Initially serving as a simple digital brochure, websites have now evolved into multifaceted tools: lead generation platforms, job offer portals, product catalogs, blogs, and more.
However, with so many functions, it’s worth asking whether your website delivers what is most important for your business.
What are the costs of your website?
Creating and maintaining a multifunction website is expensive.
According to Webflow, a stable CMS system, reliable hosting, and a skilled front-end engineer can cost between $75,000 and $100,000 annually. For high-traffic or content-heavy sites, these costs can be even higher.
The more features and integrations you add, the more you spend each month.
And these costs only cover keeping the site online, not attracting and converting users into customers.
What is the experience of your website?
“How might we delight our users?”
This is a common question during the website design phase. Recently, it has become easier to create animations with your websites. Website builders make it accessible to anyone to develop Apple-like pages.
It’s so easy that today, it’s common to see websites with too many animations, completely distracting users from your core message. Plus, those animations can be slow to load, expensive to create, and difficult to maintain.
What if websites were boring again?
Your website isn’t a masterpiece your team of artists needs to accomplish.
Websites aren’t meant to delight the users. They are not supposed to impress how technical your team is.
Websites are tools. Their role should be clear: “I want to get more customers.”
The more functions you add, the more distractions you bring to your users. At the price of ending up like your Swiss army knife, uncomfortable and inefficient.
Websites should be boring and focus only on the intersection of users' wants and businesses' needs.
Yes, boring websites are a thing.
Netflix’s website is boring.
It doesn’t have fancy animation, crispy description, or parallax effect to delight users, and it didn’t win any “best website award of the year.”
At the same time, their website is a growth machine, averaging 400 million visitors, which mainly contributes to their 2.8 billion in revenue every month.
Productize Yourself website is also boring.
There is no animation. This one-page website has a simple call to action and a payment feature.
And yes, it has generated more than 1 million in revenue since its launch.
The secret to making boring but impactful websites is focusing on what your users want and your business needs.
And forget all the rest.
3 boring steps for your website
Anytech is a 20-employee company I worked with in Switzerland. They make metal balconies for their customers. One of their challenges is generating leads from their website.
Before starting to work with them, any email they received through their website was considered a lead. For example, someone asking for a balcony price and someone asking for their logo in PNG were considered the same: a lead.
Their goal was to increase the business impact of their website.
1) Focus on what the users want.
What do your users want?
The question we are all asking ourselves? And only one way to know: ask your users.
You probably think you are doing this every day, right?
But when did you last talk to users to understand what they want, not to sell something?
This is what we did with Anytech. We contacted some of their clients and asked them to guide us through their consideration process when they look for a balcony. We noticed 3 areas where Anytech wasn’t giving what their users wanted:
1) Personalization options (what kind of balcony is best for me?)
2) Prices (how much will it cost me?)
3) Detailed references (do they have experience with my type of building?).
By delivering on one of the 3 topics, we knew we would help the users make better decisions about their balconies.
2) What the business need.
As we mentioned at the beginning, your website is a tool. This means you should use it to reach your business needs.
For Anytech, the goal was to generate more sales. As you can imagine, selling balconies on a website can be challenging.
So, when we designed the Anytech website, we asked ourselves the following questions: How can we get recurrent and qualified leads for the Anytech sales team? What kind of information does the business team need to best support their future customers?
3) Focus on the intersection.
As a business, you work for your customers. However, only delivering what customers want is not sustainable.
Boring websites focus only on what users want the most and what businesses need for growth.
And discard everything else.
By focusing on the intersection for Anyatech, we came up with a price calculator for balconies.
We knew the current customers struggled to understand the price and cost of a Balcony.
For Anytech, giving a price is complicated because the price depends on so many different factors. However, providing an estimation is easy.
We built a price calculator quickly and launched it with their new website. Since then, we have increased the leads generated from the website by 328%, translating to more than 1000 leads/year.
In addition, we added more questions to the calculator to qualify the leads, helping the sales team jump on the phone when someone was ready to order a new balcony.
The website has mostly stayed the same since its launch in 2022. It just works and generates business opportunities for the entire business team.
Boring is the future of website
A boring website is about delivering what your customers need to reach your business goals.
Focusing on the intersection will maximize your website’s business impact and ROI.
Keeping things lean will also prevent problems such as technical dependencies, third-party integration, and multi-tools management.
Boring isn’t easy.
Boring requires courage and discipline. It takes courage to choose one user and reject the others. It takes discipline to say no and keep your tool simple to add on.
Don’t fall for the charm of the Swiss Army knife. Remember, when was the last time you used one anyway?
