Design websites like you’re making a movie trailer
Building a new website for a client can get complicated long before pixels are allocated and development environments are fired up. We at MAKE Digital ask clients a slew of questions. We try to anticipate and prepare for every eventuality; every client desire; every user need. And we do so by crafting content with certain keywords, placing a button here, a form there, buttons in these 47 other spots, more text over there, and hey-let’s-not-forget-the-favicon-and-meta-description-omg!
Don’t get me wrong, thosequestions and their resultant actions are extremely important, and I’m certainly not advocating that you don’t go through those exercises.
But the focus on what a website can do for a company’s customers can’t come at the expense of how it makes customers feel about the company.
Websites evoke emotion whether you want them to or not.
The temptation is to think of websites as purely transactional. Your client needs something from its customers—money, leads, increased awareness about a topic, and the customers need something from the client—products, opportunities, knowledge. The website is the middle-person (figuratively speaking) satisfying both sides of that equation.
Simple, right?
It’s that seeming simplicity that drives some digital agencies to focus almost maniacally on the deliverables themselves. Check all the prebuilt boxes, ship the site out the door, boom! Success.
…Then the site doesn’t perform.
Why? Because those agencies lost sight of what a website truly is.
Just focus on that feeling along with getting all those boxes checked.
Websites are movie trailers. They’re the first glimpses for many at the products, companies, brands, fill-in-the-blank things they represent. The movie? That’s your client’s company itself. That movie documents a rich history: an early spark of an idea, failures, learnings from those failures, resultant successes, a ready and receptive audience, and a deep cast of actors playing out their roles, each with stories of his or her own.
A website cannot capture that entire plot, with all its twists and turns. In fact, it should not. Try, and you’ll build a behemoth of a thing with every box checked and no results to brag about whatsoever. The site’s visitors aren’t going to feel satisfied because this site has everything they could ever want; they’re going to feel frustrated they can’t find anything, confused by the site’s messaging, annoyed at its busy navigation, and ultimately relieved—when they click away from the site.
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Just because your website is devoid of emotion doesn’t mean its visitors are going to be. Your job isn’t to pretend otherwise and hammer out those checkboxes. Your job is to build a site that drives users to the exact emotions that will register the right calls to action in the end.
Movie trailers aren’t Cliff’s Notes for the movie. They’re advertisements.
Think back to the last awesome trailer you saw. Did you think it was awesome because it covered every single plot point the movie contained? Did it showcase the entire arcs of every character? Did it spell out in exhausting detail exactly what you as a moviegoer were going to see when you went to the theater (y’know, pre-COVID, when theaters were a thing)? Of course not. At least, I hope not, or we need to have a chat about your taste in movie trailers.
You undoubtedly found that trailer awesome because it stirred up a feeling in you that led to one invariable conclusion: I have got to go see that movie when it comes out! It teased insane action sequences with hardly any space given to plot exposition or dialogue of any kind. Or maybe it showcased two hapless souls on a crash course toward endless love without bothering to explain who those people are and why you should give a damn about their love lives. It brought to vivid life some beloved source material you read as a kid and could only picture in your mind.
Whatever it was, whatever the genre, it targeted specific reactions from its audience, and it was that reaction, not the trailer itself, that drove people to see the movie weeks or months later. They remembered how they felt about the trailer, and they projected that feeling onto the movie excitedly (and sometimes…quite…mistakenly).
Build a website that delivers the feels along with the goods.
A company’s website needs to feel like it belongs to the company it…well, belongs to. It can be jarring and off-putting to a user if not. And remember: emotion doesn’t have to imply soaring excitement or heartwarming nostalgia. Depending on the client in question, the right emotions might be ones of comfort and confidence in a trustworthy brand—financial companies, law firms, educational campaigns, and so on. It might be a certain “cool factor” a brand exudes and the user subsequently feels.
Just focus on that feeling along with getting all those boxes checked. After all, your websites have to make certain tantalizing promises about the brands behind them in order to deliver on those promises. As a counterpoint to the above movies that—in my humble opinion (but I’m right)—were terrible, yet propped up by really good trailers, Hollywood is littered with really good movies torpedoed at the box office because their trailers completely sucked.
And if people describe your sites with one phrase, you could do a whole lot worse than “they deliver on their promises.”
