Pretty is great, but working is better.
I’ve been building websites for over 20 years now, and I can tell you exactly what happens when a site is all look and no strategy. It gets compliments, sure. But, it doesn’t get clients.
Somewhere along the way I got tired of watching that happen. Clients paid for a website, they got something pretty, but they didn’t get strategy. I took some time to document the fixes I was making, then I built a checklist. Not the kind you scribble on a sticky note and lose by Tuesday. [guilty!] Nope. I built a real framework that I can apply repeatedly to every build. It’s the five things every site I build gets checked against before I ever call it done. I call it BLOOM.
Base. Look. Offer. Order. Maintain.
Over the next few weeks I’m going to walk through each piece of it, one post at a time. But first, here’s the short version so you know what’s coming.
Why I built this
Early on, a lot of my job was fixing other people’s “pretty.” Clients came to me with a gorgeous homepage that gave no idea what the business actually sold. Beautiful photos, buried three scrolls under a menu nobody could find on their phone. A whole brand built on a platform the owner didn’t even have the login for.
Those websites weren’t bad because they were ugly. They were bad because looks were the only thing anyone checked. Visitors got a great view, but no reason to stick around. Or, sometimes they didn’t even stick around to see the beauty because the site took forever to load so they just bounced.
Google’s own data backs this up – companies that improved core site performance saw real, measurable jumps in revenue and conversions. Not because the site suddenly looked nicer, but because it finally worked the way it needed to.
So BLOOM isn’t a design philosophy. It’s a diagnostic test I run. Five questions I run every project through, in order, before I hand over the keys.
The five pillars
B is for Base. Hosting, ownership, security, speed. The soil everything else grows out of. If this part’s shaky, nothing on top of it matters, no matter how good the design looks.
L is for Look. Does it feel like your business, or like a template with your logo pasted on top? Something that actually looks and sounds like you, not a generic stand-in for ‘a business.’
O is for Offer. Is what you sell clear the second someone lands on the page, not buried three scrolls down or left to guesswork?
O is for Order. Structure and path. Does the site lead someone somewhere, or is it a pretty brochure nobody clicks past the homepage? [Totally fine IF that’s the intended purpose.]
M is for Maintain. The part everyone skips, and the part I’m best at. Updates, backups, a schedule so you’re not the one lying awake wondering if your site’s about to break. [I am.]
With all five in place, your website is more than a pretty decoration. It’s a tool that’s actually working for you while you’re off doing the rest of your business. As it should be.
What’s coming
Each of the next five posts is going to go deep on one letter. What it actually means, what I check for, and what happens when a site skips it.
If you want your website to bloom [see what I did there?], go read more about my web design process, and let’s talk about what that looks like for yours.
