Don’t Build Your Website Like Sarah’s House
- R. Ellison\M Hudson
- Jan 25, 2020
- 2 min read
Is it possible to build a house without a blueprint? It’s possible but not very smart. The same could be said about a website without a strategy. To illustrate this go back to 1884 - a time before the Internet, before computers, before radio and before wireless telegraphy. It is a story about Sarah Winchester who built one of the world’s most mysterious homes.
Following the deaths of her infant daughter and beloved husband, Sarah Winchester, became heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company – known for its guns that ‘Won the Wild West’. Falling into a depression, Sarah believed that she was cursed by the spirits who had been killed by Winchester rifles. To redeem herself, she would have to build a house for herself and the spirits of those dead souls. A medium reportedly told her that she would die if construction on the house stopped. With this warning, construction on her modest California farmhouse began immediately and would continue 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for the next 38 years. Rooms continued to get added and the house grew from eight rooms to a 160 room mansion, spanning over 2.5 acres of land.
Without a master plan or blueprint, rooms kept getting added on and the house ended up with doors that opened into walls, staircases that lead nowhere, and windows that looked into walls. The house became so complex that many of the serving staff had trouble finding rooms. Sarah herself no doubt got lost in the maze! Construction stopped on September 5, 1922 when Sarah died in her 83rd year.
Think of a website like a house. It has many places to go and often multiple entry points. But without a Web strategy what resulted in Sarah’s house is exactly what happens to Web sites. With no plan content just gets added and navigation becomes confusing. This can lead to pages that go nowhere or links that frustratingly take you though a labyrinth of information or a dead end.
A Web Strategy can avoid years of appended construction. Clear goals with an implementation plan will help create a user friendly environment. Like a house there is always maintenance and renovation on a website. With a properly constructed foundation those renovations won’t be costly and time consuming.
A web strategy analyses valuable factors that can help achieve a successful site such as: visitor patterns, subject matter, and audiences’ preferences in function and features. The strategy looks at how users search for information, how that information influences opinions and how it can engage action.
A website is vital to the interactions with your organization’s online audiences. But, you can’t just build a site and hope they will come. You need a plan otherwise we will end up with an old, impractical house full of cobwebs.
Check out the movie about Sarah.
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