Why B2B Website Projects Are So Hard

A website is where every decision you have already made gets tested at once, in public, in front of the people you most want to impress.

Business strategy. Positioning. What you decided to charge and who you decided to sell to. The category you chose to compete in. Whether your messaging was ever really settled, or just left ambiguous long enough to become a habit. All of it surfaces on the website. That is what makes these projects hard. Not the design, and not the build.

The compliment that arrived years late

We started a website project a few years ago that never went anywhere. Our main contact sat on the client's internal team. He left in the early stages, well before the halfway mark, and the project quietly died after him.

He has since been close to a lot of website projects, directly and indirectly. He came back to us recently to say that the way we had been trying to run that one was the right way.

He had nothing to gain by saying it. There was no work on the table and no relationship to protect. He had simply seen enough since to recognise what he had been standing in the middle of.

That is the most useful feedback we have had on how we work, and it came from a project that failed.

Everything that has to be settled before anyone opens a design tool

Here is what actually sits underneath a website project. Most of it has very little to do with websites.

The strategy underneath

• What is the business strategy, and is the website being asked to carry a decision nobody has made yet
• Is the positioning settled, or does the website project become the place it finally gets argued out
• Is the messaging agreed, and by whom
• Is there a real visual language, or a logo and three colours nobody has agreed on
• What do the founders actually believe, and will they be in the room to defend it

The market you are walking into

• How mature is the category. A new one has to be explained. A crowded one has to be differentiated. Those are opposite jobs.
• How good are your competitors' websites. That sets the floor, not your own last site.
• Is there urgency for the buyer, or is doing nothing a comfortable option

The people arriving

• Who is the user and who is the buyer. Frequently not the same person, and rarely persuaded by the same thing.
• Whose budget is it, and who else has to approve it
• How much do visitors already know about you before they land
• What is the price point, and what alternatives are they weighing you against
• How much of the traffic is paid and how much is search. A paid visitor and a search visitor arrive mid-thought at different points.

What the site actually has to be

• What is the narrative
• Which pages do you need. Product, solution and industry pages are sometimes three versions of the same argument.
• What belongs on the homepage, and what is only there out of habit
• How much detail. Sometimes a film does more in ninety seconds than a page of copy does in a thousand words.
• Do these people scan or read. Both, at different moments, and the page has to hold up either way.

Whether it can actually be built

• Development constraints, and what the platform will and will not do
• Who on your side is available, and whether they genuinely have the time
• Who signs off, and were they in the room when the thinking happened
• Does the content exist, or are we writing it
• Is search even a channel for you. If it is not, a migration matters far less than everyone assumes.
• Redirects, 404s and everything else that decides whether a migration keeps your search traffic or quietly loses it

Any one of these can stall a project. Several of them usually do.

Why there is no playbook

The honest answer to most website questions is that it depends on who is arriving and what they already believe.

People will tell you the hero needs an H1, an H2 and a button in a particular place. Sometimes that is right. But different buyers arrive at different points in the buying journey and want different things from the same screen. Someone comparing three vendors needs one thing. Someone who has never heard of the category needs another. No rule serves both.

Everybody has an opinion, and everybody is entitled to a long one. People inside the company. The audience. Strangers on the internet, at length, with a framework. Most of those opinions are reasonable on their own and they conflict with each other. Against all of that you have to do what makes sense for this company at this moment, and be able to say why.

And it moves while you are building it

The company you start designing for in month one is not quite the company you launch for in month five. A round closes. A competitor launches. Someone senior joins with views. The positioning that felt settled at kickoff gets reopened because of something a customer said on a sales call.

None of that is anybody behaving badly. It is what a growing company does. But it means the brief is a moving target, and a team that treats the brief as fixed will build something slightly wrong and then defend it.

Underneath that sit the craft decisions, and they are not neutral either. Does this need 3D, or is that just what the last site everyone admired had? Does an idea want animation, or will it read faster as a still? When does it have to be live, and did anyone choose that date for a reason?

Every one of those is a balance between logic and impression. A page has to make sense and it has to land. Argue only from logic and you get something correct, complete and forgettable. Chase only the impression and you get something that photographs well and answers nothing. Holding both, screen by screen, and knowing which to favour where, is most of the job.

Then hold that steady while a dozen reasonable people want different things. That management is not overhead sitting on top of the work. It is a large part of the work.

What you can bring instead

Since there is no playbook, you go and do the work the playbook would have saved you. You go all the way into the category, and into the product as a buyer actually meets it, not as the people who built it describe it.

And you bring the failure modes. We know every way one of these goes wrong, and how to hold a project together when it starts to. That part is earned, and it was earned expensively, on projects like the one that opens this piece.

Experience does not hand you a template. It hands you a list of things you will not do again.

It takes a village

The strategy has to be right. The content has to be right, and designed rather than poured into a layout. Then comes execution: the build, the responsiveness, the redirects, the 404s, the hundred small things at migration that nobody notices unless they go wrong.

It is a genuine team effort, and the roles involved are more numerous than most people expect. When you see a website project that landed well, a lot of people got a lot of decisions right in sequence. That deserves more credit than it usually gets.

If you are about to start one

Choosing the team is the hardest part, whether that team is internal, external, or a mix. Our own process runs in eight stages and we are open about how we work, but the stages are not the difficult bit. Knowing which of the questions above are unresolved, and having the nerve to stop and settle them before design starts, is.

Each project is an animal of its own. Plenty carries over from the last one. What does not carry over is the thinking, and that has to be done again every time.

If you are weighing up in-house against an agency, or looking for a partner who will work alongside your own team, those are the questions worth asking them.