Over the past decade a lot has changed on the web, however most businesses still approach their website in the same way – as marketing. This has to change.

All companies  are now in the software business. Your website is a piece of software and it is part of your product or service offering.

That is a radical shift from the marketing/advertising mindset that most businesses still have about the web. You need to approach your website with the same care that you would approach any product design and development. How can your web presence help your customers? How can it improve your product/service offering? Those are key questions to ask when approaching any web project, whether it’s your corporate website or a specific web app.

The majority of companies go to their advertising or marketing agencies to design and build their websites, due to existing relationships and/or the frame of mind stated above. Some agencies have done a good job reconfiguring themselves to design software rather than marketing materials, but a lot haven’t. This leads to websites that do little other than try to sell existing products, not become an integral part of the product themselves.

As more an more products and services become tied to interaction with data and the web, these issues will become more and more important for the success of your business. Marketing agencies are not setup to do product development well. The tight timelines, production and sales attitude, and segregation of designers and developers makes it very difficult to achieve the best results when designing complex applications. Websites, connected products, and applications are not marketing objects and can’t be designed will within the frame of marketing.

In order to get the most out of your website you need to approach it in the same way your would approach developing a new non-web product – do research, gather requirements and contraints, iterate and collaborate across disciplines and organizations, and finally build the design. Would you go to your marketing agency to design a physical product for your company? Probably not.

All those “traditional” products are starting to cross the line and interface more and more with connected devices. What we need is a design studio for modern, 21st century, products that approaches websites, applications, and technology in the same way that other designers approach products and services.

We’re aspiring to be just that here at Normative, but still have a lot to learn.