Writing is an art. Design is an art. Programming and User Experience are artforms. The way a website looks, feels, communicates, and behaves are the results of acts of creation. A website is born of a series of creative decisions that are based on preferences and personal aesthetics just as much as they’re based on best practice and user data.
We’d love to make it a hard science. We try to make it science. We try to get under the hood of the Google machine to discover its secrets. We search for the Rosetta Stone of the web that will tell us how to build perfect sites that draw organic traffic, delight our visitors, clearly articulate our brands, and lead to immediate tangible actions.
In some sense we can make it science. We can make inferences about search engine algorithms based on Google’s cryptic clues and search result patterns. And then we can make decisions about content and design based on what we’ve learned. This helps people find our sites. It helps keep sites usable and understandable.
But there are things you can never know with absolute certainty
You can never know how visitors will respond to your site. You can guess. But people are fickle and unpredictable. Their wants and needs change by the minute. Yes, they want to find what they’re looking for without difficulty. They want the path of least resistance. They Google their questions and find the answer as quickly as possible.
But they also want to be delighted. They want to be entertained. They want to feel something. A site built purely on scientific methodology will inevitably fail to delight your guests. Delight comes from surprise. How can you surprise anyone if you only do what’s been done before? But the dogma of data-based web building would have you believe that you should only do what’s been tried and tested.
You can never know what Google has in store for us. And spending your life trying to catch up with Google’s whims (I mean brilliant choices. Please don’t take my internet away, Google Overlords) will make you a reactionary. You’ll forget about the people who visit your site, the things that make them laugh or feel, and sacrifice their needs and wants for the cold heartless needs and wants of a search engine. It will make your site robotic and impersonal. Over the years this has played out in different ways. Keyword stuffing. Aggressive and invasive backlink trading. Junk sites designed for the sole purpose of link building. Now we’re seeing content farming and landing page after landing page that are mirror images of each other.
Your users aren’t asking for this. Your users don’t want you to use the same keyword 7 times in your opening paragraph. Your users don’t want links that take them to other shitty websites. They don’t want to waste their time reading pointless articles that don’t benefit them or teach them something new. The bullshit detectors are high.
No risk, no reward
I’m not dismissing data-based decision making. It’s important to look at the data to learn what works and what doesn’t, to figure out how to improve our usability and help visitors find what they’re looking for.
But the data-only path prevents risk. And risk is good. Risk is necessary in this business. We lean on science because then we can’t be held accountable for wrong decisions. Leadership doesn’t argue with data-driven choices.
But if your business is stagnant (as many businesses are), data-driven decisions won't necessarily help you. If you need a bigger audience, that means you need to reach new people. If you’re making all of your decisions based on how your current audience behaves, how do you expect to draw a new audience?
Let’s say you’re starting a bug collection. You have the market on flies cornered with your honey trap. All the flies in the area are yours. But you want more bugs. So you say “Well, our fly audience loves this honey. Let’s just put more honey out.”
Do you really think that’ll work? You already have all the flies. You need new, different bugs. You need to start planting flowers to bring in the bees and the butterflies. Added bonus if you make a deal with the bees to make honey to keep your fly customers happy.
Analogies rule.
But this is where things get scary. We know how to attract flies with honey. We don’t know the first thing about flowers.
If you’re not willing to learn and give it a try, you can’t expect your audience to grow. You can't expect anything to change. And your business will plateau and maintain if you're lucky, cease to be relevant and disappear if you're not.
Writers, designers, and developers are the people on the front lines—learning, innovating, creating something where there was nothing, and taking big risks to reach new audiences. It’s never safe and it’s never comfortable. You all, content humans, are the courageous flower planters in a world of honey distributors.
Be brave, my friends. You’ll do great.