NOT SO OBVIOUS
Eleven tiles are not an offer strategy
The company grows. So does its offer. A new service is added. Then another specialisation. A new product. A new client segment. Someone suggests adding industry solutions as well. Someone else wants to showcase the team's competences. And suddenly eleven equal blocks appear on the website. Each has its own description. Each is important. Each has a good reason to be there.
For people inside the organisation, everything adds up. Every element has its own history, owner and business rationale. But the client does not know our history.
The client does not know our history.
They come to the website and see the offer the way the company has arranged it. Except that the client did not come to learn about the structure of our organisation; they came to check a few simple things:
- Do we understand their problem?
- Do we have the right answer for them?
- Is it worth taking the next step with us? And what is that step?
What matters to the client?
This is exactly where the problem very often begins. A company naturally looks at its offer from the inside: through services, products, competences, teams and structure.
The client, however, looks at it completely differently.
Through a problem.
A need.
The situation they are in.
And the decision they are trying to make right now.
That is why, when working on an offer, or rather on the promise a website makes, I come back to one question:
Are we showing the way we have organised the company, or the way the client makes decisions?
Very often, this leads to two completely different architectures.
The first answers the question:
What do we have?
The second:
What does the client need, and how can we help them find the right answer?
Offer strategy starts before design
If you want to prepare a good offer strategy, do not start with the question:
How do we fit all our services on the website?
Start with a much harder one instead:
What should the client really see, and in what order?
If you are about to start a website project or a redesign, it is worth working through this moment before the brief, the UX and the first screen are created.
That is why I have prepared a separate TOOLKIT: “What should you settle before starting a new website project?” - a short, practical starting point for organising decisions before you move into design.
If everything is important, nothing is truly most important
If everything in your offer is equally important, the client does not know where to start. A good offer architecture does not show everything equally. It sets priorities. It brings order. It guides.
A website should help the client quickly understand what matters.
A website should not be a company encyclopaedia. It should help the client quickly understand whether they are in the right place, what matters to them and what the next step should be.
The eleven-tile problem is not a design problem
That is why the problem of the proverbial eleven tiles is not a design problem. It is a problem of decisions that the company has not made.
Where do we want to lead the client?
The client does not know our goal; we ourselves have to know where we want to lead them.
So we have to decide:
💡What should they understand?
💡What should they choose?
💡What should they do next?
Only then does the website start working strategically - not as a catalogue of what we have, but as a path to the decision we want to make easier for the client.
If you want to see this problem more broadly, also read my DEEP DIVE: “What do we really design when we design a website?”
There I show why a website project very quickly stops being a project “about the website” and becomes a conversation about the company's strategy, offer, priorities and the choices that have to be made before Figma is even opened.
If this problem sounds familiar
Perhaps you do not need another redesign; you simply need to answer a few difficult questions first:
💡What are we really selling?
💡To whom?
💡What should be the priority today?
💡And what decision should our website make easier?
These are exactly the questions I start with on strategic, offer and transformation projects.
Not with the layout.
With a choice.
SEE BEYOND. CREATE.
OFFER STRATEGY · WEBSITE ARCHITECTURE · CLIENT DECISION
