Positioning Before Website
Websites get built for nobody. Positioning tells you who it's for, before you've paid a designer a penny.
Websites get built for nobody. Positioning tells you who it's for, before you've paid a designer a penny.
You've bought the frame first The colours are chosen, the fonts are lovely, and somewhere underneath it all is a client who hasn't been described yet. Get the sentence right and the site writes itself.
A new website tends to start with the fun bits. Colours, fonts, a nice photo of some pebbles.
The client who needs help gets fitted round the design afterwards, like a guest squeezed onto the end of a bench built for four and forced to seat five if everyone breathes in.
You end up with a site that looks lovely and says nothing to anyone. It's the equivalent of laying the table beautifully and forgetting what's for dinner, or who's coming.
Wellness marketing deep dives: key ideas that underpin this:
Full picture: practical guidance on this topic:
Decide who the practice serves before you decide what colour the buttons are. The buttons can wait. They're very patient, buttons.
Positioning isn't a mission statement. Nobody in a crisis has ever needed to know your values.
It's one sentence that says who you help and what changes for them, plain enough for a stressed reader to catch between floors three and four and think, right, that's me.
Tell them what shifts. Sleep, marriage, the shouting, the Sunday dread.
Say the thing, not the feeling around the thing. The feeling can come later, once you've booked in.
If your sentence needs a lift to itself, it isn't a sentence yet.
71.8% of UK therapists earn £30,000 or less a year. Most followed the standard advice to the letter.
The standard advice skips positioning entirely. It lands you posting three times a week about breathing, to an audience that already knows how to breathe.
Content without positioning drains you for nothing. You can post daily for a year and still be a well-photographed mystery to the one client who needed you on a Tuesday.
Engagement is not a booking. A heart on a post has never once paid an invoice.
Working this out yourself takes time you'd rather spend with clients. It also takes a strange, cool distance from your own training that's hard to summon on a Tuesday afternoon.
You trained in the thing. Standing back and describing it plainly, like a stranger might, is a different skill entirely.
Bringing in help costs money and buys you detachment. Doing it solo costs time and asks for a trust in your own plain sentences you may not feel yet.
Both routes get you there, provided you finish one of them and don't abandon both politely in a drawer.
A clear position changes every word on the page, before a single page exists.
Get your sentence sorted this afternoon, over a cup of tea and not a design brief.
Rate your practice: score your practice:
Then the website stops being a mystery and starts being paperwork.
Paperwork you can hand to anyone. A mystery, you carry round yourself, indefinitely, like a coat you never quite get round to taking to the cleaners.
Decide who it's for. The website is just the envelope.
Find out exactly where your positioning stands before you spend another penny on design. Score your practice
Well done, thinker. We love thinkers and they love our careful ways - our listening wind, story garden and visual river are all waiting for you in a twenty-five-minute coffee conversation that helps you rekindle faith in growing your practice. Milk and sugar?
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