Is Your Website Secretly a Product?

We need a new website! The words that kick off an exciting, sometimes frustrating, search for the perfect partner—someone who knows your industry, knows web design, and can expertly guide you through the ups and downs of a digital process. As you start to have internal discussion and write your RFP, here’s a key question that can often be overlooked: do we need a new website or a new product?

Website or Product: What’s the diff?

A website can be thought of as your digital home—it’s a place to inform, inspire, or entertain. Websites share your message with the world. Website visitors are coming to look around, see the latest news, maybe watch a video, and then leave. They may interact with the site via donations, sign-ups for newsletters, or click to share an article. By and large, websites are more for sharing information than they are places where people take two-way action.

Products, in contrast, help people solve problems. A product-oriented website has utility beyond the information being shared. They’re for visitors trying to complete a search, make a purchase, or finish a task on your site. 

Product-oriented websites

Threespot has partnered with many incredible organizations to create product-oriented websites. Here are a few examples of ways a website can function as a product: 

PANFoundation.org: Medication assistance 

PAN Foundation offers financial assistance to help people with serious illnesses afford their out-of-pocket treatment costs and improve their quality of life. Their website is an excellent example of how many healthcare websites have become products. When patients need information and assistance, the PAN Foundation website allows them to find and apply for financial assistance via a self-service portal. By providing a product experience on their website, the PAN Foundation ensures that the services they provide are accessible to their users whenever and wherever they need them. 

Harvard Graduate School of Education: Zaentz Navigator

The Zaentz Navigator is a user-friendly, interactive tool for policymakers and leaders to learn how cities and states across the country are tackling issues as they structure, finance, expand, and improve early education and care. This website is an incredible resource for the early education field, bringing together disparate data sources and giving users the ability to filter the data according to their own research needs. Rather than simply present the data, the Zaentz Navigator acts as a product by offering users the ability to to tell their own data story. 

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum: E-commerce and art 

As one of the most significant artists of the 20th century, Georgia O’Keeffe’s unique vision defined American modernism. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, NM houses the largest repository of her work. Their website is a robust example of a website designed to function as a product, with design and functionality working together. Working in partnership with the museum team, we developed a new, modern, easy-to-use online store experience that makes browsing intuitive and pairs with an online ticketing system that gives users the ability to plan their whole visit from anywhere. 

Plan your website as a product

As you think about the next iteration of your digital home, consider how it can support user and organizational goals. Take a product mindset and ask yourself:

• What problems is our user facing that we can help solve?
• How does our website currently solve user problems?
• What would improve the user experience and make it easier for them to solve their problems?
• Do our digital business objectives require a product that solves user problems or can we best serve our audiences with a website designed more for browsing and consumption of content?

Answering these questions will help you understand what your website needs to be successful in meeting your users’ needs. If you target your website as a product (rather than a project) and design it to meet the user needs you identified above, you’ll end with a website that will serve and delight your users.