What is read, before anything is decided
The brief
- Business
- Model
- Constraints
- Owners
- Market
- Buyers
- Alternatives
- Their language
- Existing system
- What is measured
- What is assumed
- What breaks
01 / Capabilities
Strategy
Positioning, audience and digital architecture decided before design starts, so the build has something to be right about.
Part of — 01 Define
What it is
Digital strategy is the decision layer that sits above design and engineering. It establishes who the work is for, what it has to make them do, which pages exist to do it, and how success will be recognised. Without it, a redesign is an aesthetic opinion with a budget attached.
The mechanism
A decision system, not a strategy deck.
Research is structured before it is gathered, a position is chosen against the alternatives a buyer actually has, and every decision is written down with what it rules out.
Where a claim can be defended
- Crowded middle
- Stated position
- Chosen position
Positions are relative, not measured.
Every decision leaves a record
option setOptionsNamed, not impliedMappedcriteriaCriteriaAgreed before the options are scoredStructuredtrade-off logTrade-offsWhat each option costsVerifieddecision recordDecisionWith what it rules outOwnedsitemapArchitectureThe decision, as pagesReady
Who it is for
- Companies whose site describes what they sell but not why it is different
- Teams rebuilding after a pivot, merger or new product line
- Founders who need an outside read on the market before committing to a build
What usually breaks
- Traffic arrives and leaves without the business understanding which promise failed.
- Every department wants its own page, and the architecture becomes an org chart.
- Nobody agreed on what a successful launch looks like, so nothing can be judged after it.
What we change
01
Read the evidence first
Existing analytics, search demand, sales conversations and the current site. We start from what is already observable rather than from a workshop.
02
Narrow before you expand
A proposition that tries to serve everyone converts nobody. We name the primary audience, the secondary one, and who we are deliberately losing.
03
Architecture is the strategy
The page map, the URL contract and the internal linking model encode the strategy far more durably than a deck does.
Deliverables
- Positioning statement and message hierarchy
- Primary and secondary audience definitions with the decisions they are making
- Page architecture, URL contract and internal linking model
- Search and answer-intent map per page
- Success definition: the events that count, and the ones that do not
What it does not do
- We do not forecast demand that is not already visible in search data, sales conversations or the existing analytics.
- A strategy does not survive a decision-maker who was not in the room. We will ask for the people who can say yes.
- We will not write a positioning the business cannot actually deliver on.
Process
01
Evidence review
Analytics, search data, competitors, sales objections and the current system, read together rather than in isolation.
02
Proposition work
Draft, argue and narrow the claim until it is specific enough to be wrong.
03
Architecture
Turn the claim into a page map, a URL contract and an intent model.
04
Handover
A written strategy that design and engineering can build from without re-interpreting it.
Questions
Do we need strategy if we only want a new website?
If the current site already converts and only looks dated, a design and build engagement is enough. If you cannot say which page is failing and why, strategy is the cheaper starting point — it is a fraction of the build cost and it prevents rebuilding the wrong thing well.
How long does a strategy engagement take?
Typically three to five weeks for a single business unit, depending on how much evidence already exists and how quickly decision-makers can be in the same room.
What is the difference between this and a brand strategy?
Brand strategy decides what the company stands for. Digital strategy decides how that shows up as pages, journeys and measurable actions. We do both, in that order.
Do you work with our internal marketing team or replace it?
We work with it. The people who live with the business every day know things no external studio learns in five weeks. Strategy is where that knowledge gets written down and tested: we usually run the research and the arguments, and your team owns the decisions we put in front of them.
—Start
Have a system worth building?
Tell us what the business needs to do. We will tell you what it takes to build it, and what it takes to keep it running.