Everybody asks for the website first

Heather Crank has watched the same thing happen in two towns. When she moved to Denver after design school, it was smallish, and the creative work there was a lot of web. She'd interview as a motion designer, and people couldn't quite understand what she did compared to the web world. Then the town grew, and motion followed. Now she's back in Bend, where she grew up, and she sees it starting again. "Bend is a little behind," she said.

When she came on my podcast, she put the order plainly. People need money, they build the thing, and only when they're ready to go hard at advertising and marketing do they come to the motion designers. "We are literally the cherry on top."

I've seen the front half of that from my side for years. At the agency, we only wanted to do brand work. Nobody who called us knew what brand was or how to buy it. So the way in was almost always the same sentence: we need a website.

The website is the part they can see

Heather's read on why goes deeper than the order. "People recognize that they need something to be more visible, but they don't understand the problem that they're solving." The website is the visible thing. You can point at it, compare it to a competitor's and know when it's done.

The work underneath it is harder to picture: who the business is for, how it's positioned, what the brand is supposed to be doing and why any of it matters. Heather called that defining the problem, and she put it before everything else. Once the identity is set and you know your niche and the problem you're here to solve, then you go out beyond the website and figure out how to reach people. Motion comes in there, not before.

Why it's the website, every time

There isn't one reason people walk in asking for the website. It changes from one owner to the next.

Sometimes it's just the thing they can picture. They know they need to look like a real business, and a website is the most obvious proof of that.

Sometimes somebody already sold it to them. Before they ever called me, someone told them a new site would fix it, and they arrived with the answer already bought.

And sometimes the work underneath doesn't feel like it produced anything. I've delivered the brand work and watched the client look at it and think, I spent a bunch of money, and what did I get? I just got a book. A website at least feels like something. It's part of why I've shifted toward marketing work, because it's easier to sell when I can point to an outcome.

Put the website where it belongs

None of that makes them wrong. They will need a website at some point. At the agency, the job was switching the question from "we need a website" to "what goes on the website?" The answer to that lives in the work that comes before it.

Heather said the same about her own craft. "People are not going to want to spend money on motion design if they don't understand the value of it or why it's important." The cherry only works on top of something.

So when an owner calls and opens with the website, I don't argue with the website. I ask what it's supposed to do and who it's for. If they can't answer yet, that's where we start, with the strategy that tells us what the site should say. Then we build it.