Read your own site the way a stranger would

The pass that comes last

Every lesson before this one judged a single part of a site: the first screen, the phone number, the photographs, how much to write, the proof. That is the only sensible way to teach it and it is not how anybody experiences a website. A customer gets the whole thing at once, on a phone, in about forty seconds, while doing something else.

So this is the closing pass, and what it produces is a written list. Not a feeling that the site could be a bit better — that is where most people stop and it changes nothing. A list, on paper, one line per thing that went wrong and the place it went wrong in. Then the sentences to send the builder, which is where this course hands back to the first one.

It has to be written because you cannot hold it. Somewhere around the fourth thing you notice, you start defending the first three, and by the bottom of the page the site seems fine again. Paper removes the argument. A line is either crossed off or it is not.

The other reason is harder to admit. You are the worst possible reader of your own site. You know what the headline means because you wrote the brief it came from, and you have looked at the home page so many times that you no longer see it — you remember it. Most of what follows is a set of tricks for getting round that.

What to have ready

Your own phone

Not the laptop the site was approved on. Most of the people who will ever read it are holding a phone, and the version you have been signing off is not the version they get.

The address a customer would be given

The live one, opened the way somebody would open it. Not the builder's preview with the editor around it, and not a tab you already had open.

Ten minutes nobody interrupts

The walk takes about six. The rest is writing the list up while it is still fresh, which is the part people skip and then regret.

Something to write on that is not the phone

Paper, or a notebook. If the notes app is on the same screen as the site, you will stop reading and start editing, and the pass is over.

One other person, for the end

Somebody who has never seen it. They do not need to be a likely customer. They need to be uninformed, and they need to be willing to be watched.

Set it up so it can fail

A test the site cannot fail is not a test. The point of the conditions below is to remove every advantage you have been quietly giving it — the big screen, the fast connection, the knowledge of where everything is, the patience of somebody who paid for it.

• The live address, reached the way a customer reaches it, from a message or a search rather than a bookmark.
• A phone, held in one hand, the way you hold it standing in a queue.
• A browser you are not signed into, or a private window, so there is no autofill and no history helping you.
• No tidying up first. Do not fix the thing you already know about — you are measuring the site that exists, not the one you meant to build.
• Cold. Do not re-read the site the night before to remind yourself what is on it.
• If your patience is unusually good, make it worse on purpose. Do it standing up, with the television on, before your first coffee.

Note. Signal matters more than people expect. Try it once on mobile data rather than the house wifi, somewhere with two bars. A site that is fine on a fast connection and slow on a poor one is slow for precisely the customer standing outside with a problem, which is the customer worth the most.

The walkthrough, in order

Do these in sequence and do not skip ahead. Several of the steps only work because the one before it has not been contaminated yet.

1. Before you open anything, write one sentence on the paper: what you want a stranger to do within a minute of arriving. Ring, message, book, read the prices. One thing. Fold the paper over it.
2. Open the address. Look at the screen for five seconds — count them properly — then turn the phone face down.
3. From memory, write three things: what this business does, where it works, and what it wanted you to do. Write what you actually retained, not what you know is on there. This step is the entire test and it is the one everybody is tempted to cheat.
4. Turn the phone back over. Without scrolling at all, list what is genuinely visible on that first screen — the words, the button, the number if there is one. Then unfold the paper and compare.
5. Now try to contact the business one-handed, thumb only, without scrolling further than you already have. Time it. If your thumb has to reach the top corner, or you need the second hand, write that down.
6. Go back to the top and scroll through once at reading speed, without going back up. Mark every point where you would have left: a wall of text, a picture that arrives late, a section repeating the one above it, a form asking for more than it needs.
7. Stop at the first paragraph of real writing and read it aloud. Properly aloud. Anything you stumble over is a sentence a reader stumbles over silently and then abandons.
8. Look at each photograph and ask one question of it: is this mine. Not is it nice, not is it well lit. Is it a picture of work this business did.
9. Pick one factual claim — a registration number, a guarantee length, an insurance figure — and try to verify it from the page alone, the way the previous lesson set out. If you cannot, that is a line on the list.
10. Send yourself a message through the site's own form. Fill it in badly, the way a real person does: no surname, a phone number with a space in the middle, three words in the box. Then open the Leads panel and check it arrived, readable, with a reply address you could actually use.
11. Search your own business name and town on the same phone. Look at what sits above your site and what your own listing says. That is the doorway most people come through, and it is part of the first impression whether you like it or not.
12. Hand the phone to the other person, open on the home page, and say nothing at all. Not one word of setting up. Watch where the thumb goes and where it stops. When they hand it back, ask them what the business does and where. Write their answer down word for word, including the wrong bits.

Tip. The hardest instruction in that list is do not fix anything. The moment you open the builder mid-walk you are reading as the owner again, and everything after that point is coloured. Finish the walk. Then open it.

Note. If the site has more than one page, walk the home page first and then repeat steps six to eight on whichever page you expect the most leads from. That is usually a service page rather than the contact page, and it is usually the page that has had the least attention.

The list you end up with

You should now have somewhere between four and fifteen lines. Fewer than four generally means you were being kind to it. More than fifteen usually means one section needs rebuilding rather than fifteen things needing nudging, and sorting the list tells you which section.

Now rewrite each line so it names a place and a change. What you scribbled in the moment is a reaction. What you need is an instruction, and writing it while the walk is fresh is the difference between ten minutes tomorrow and a lost evening next week.

Note. Anything you cannot turn into a place and a change is not a fix yet, it is a mood. Leave it on the sheet in its original words and see whether it survives the others being done. About half the time it was one of the others wearing a disguise.

Three piles, and only one of them costs anything

Now sort the rewritten lines. The sort matters because the three piles are handled in three different places, and putting a line in the wrong pile is how people spend a turn on something that was never a build problem.

• A turn: anything about words, order, layout, or what sits on which page. Most of the list lands here.
• A dashboard job: photographs to upload, prices and products to change, where leads are sent. No build, no credits, and it takes effect without asking anybody.
• A fault: something that does not work at all, like a message that never arrives. That goes to support rather than to the builder — asking for a rebuild spends a turn on the wrong problem and leaves the real one exactly where it was.

Turning the list into sentences the builder can use

The first course was about describing a business that had no site yet. This is the same skill pointed at one that exists, and it is the easier half — you are no longer describing something imagined, you are describing the difference between what is on the screen and what should be.

Four rules, and all four are about being specific enough that the change cannot be read two ways.

• Name the place, then the change. In the services section, make each of the six items a full sentence rather than a two-word label.
• One change per sentence. Two changes in one sentence is how you end up with one of them.
• Describe the outcome, not the method. The phone number should be tappable at the top of a phone screen, rather than any instruction about how that gets done.
• Say what to leave alone when the change is near something you like. The build is told to hold everything it was not asked about, on the grounds that an unrequested change is a bug from your side, and naming the part you are protecting makes that easier to hold.

Tip. Group the small wording fixes into one message. Every change is a turn, so six messages about six sentences costs six turns and one message about six sentences costs one. Keep layout changes separate, though — move three things at once and dislike the result, and you cannot tell which move did it.

Note. Read the message back and ask whether somebody who has never seen the site could carry it out. If it needs you standing beside them pointing at the screen, it is not specific enough yet, and the turn will come back with something reasonable that is not what you meant.

The things that feel wrong and are not

Some of what a fifth reading throws up is not a fault in the site. It is a fault in having read it forty times, and acting on it costs turns and usually makes the page worse. These are the ones to recognise and leave.

• The headline you are bored of. You have read it more often than any customer ever will, and boredom feels exactly like a problem when it is only familiarity.
• The logo. Unless the stranger could not tell what the business was called, it is doing its job.
• The urge to add more words. Nearly every instinct on a fifth read is to add something, and adding is how the about section got to nine paragraphs in the first place.
• A colour that is merely not your first choice. Nobody has ever left a trade website because of the blue.
• A section a competitor has and you do not. Add it because a customer would go looking for it, not because somebody else built one.
• Anything the stranger read correctly in five seconds. That part is working, and it is the part you will most want to make cleverer.

Note. The exception is hesitation. If the person you handed the phone to got there in the end but paused first, that pause is a customer leaving. It goes on the list whatever you think of the section it happened in.

How to tell the pass worked

The turn landing is not the end of it. What you are checking is whether the same walk now produces a different answer at step three, which is the only step that ever mattered.

1. Wait for the turn to finish, then open the live address on the phone again. Not the preview.
2. Do the five-second test once more, cold. Five seconds, phone face down, write the three facts.
3. Hand it to a different person from the first one, and say nothing again. Two people is a pattern. One is an opinion.
4. Go down the written list and mark every line: done, deliberately dropped, or next month. All three are honest answers and the third is the commonest.
5. Put the date on the sheet and keep it. Running this again in three months against the same sheet is how you find out whether the site drifted or you did.

Note. Run the pass again after any turn that touched the top of the page, after adding a page, and once a quarter regardless. It takes ten minutes, and it is the only test in this course that measures the site the way a customer meets it rather than one piece at a time.

Common questions

How often is this worth doing?

Once a quarter, plus after any turn that changed the first screen, plus whenever you add a page. It is ten minutes. The quarterly one catches drift, which is the kind of problem nobody notices from the inside because it arrived a sentence at a time.

Can I skip the walk and just ask a friend?

Do both, and do not swap one for the other. A friend is kinder than a customer and better informed than a stranger, so give them the same conditions — their own phone, no explanation from you, and silence while they use it. What they say afterwards is worth having. What their thumb did is worth more.

My list has fourteen lines on it. Is that fourteen turns?

No. Most lists collapse into two or three messages: one for all the wording, one for anything that moves, and a handful of jobs that never reach the builder at all because they live in the dashboard. Sort the list by that first and the cost usually surprises people downwards.

Nothing on my list is wrong exactly. Is that a pass?

Probably, and if so you should stop. The test was never whether anything is wrong — it was whether a stranger came away with the trade, the area and one obvious thing to do next. If they did, the site is working and further tidying is being done for you rather than for them.