If you don't know who your website should serve, you're probably failing at a lot of other things too, since knowing your audience should be the number one thing you focus on with your online presence.

When you're just starting your business, you usually don't have the luxury of thinking too long or experimenting too much with your website. You know what people generally want, and you probably also have experience building digital products, so you just listen to your gut feeling, publish it when it's good enough, and move on. In the best case, once you make the business stable, you'll get back to the website and ask yourself: how can I improve it to better fit my users' needs? 

The problem is—some companies never really do this.

Instead, in many cases, what they try later on doesn't add much value to their users, e.g., trying out different web platforms to continue development, or experimenting with WordPress plugins. By doing that, they're making life easier for themselves, or they randomly tweak things on the site's frontend, like adding more content and new pages. But without a well-thought-out structure, the site becomes more chaotic and less useful for their audience. And they end up hoping that if people really want it, they'll find what they need. Spoiler: users leave.

These efforts are legitimate, but the real problems come when you see your customers leaving for your competitors and your numbers generally dropping off, or when you try to scale your business but your website can no longer support your goals. That's the point when many businesses start thinking about how to make the site better serve the people they built it for in the first place. And the natural question that follows is—who exactly are they?

I experienced a similar scenario with one of my clients—a very successful educational institution from Philadelphia. They've been mentioned by President Barack Obama as an exceptional and also received two awards at the 2025 Philly Favorites competition. They're making a great impact on their community. 

But their website? It doesn't show that. 

They tried improving it by fine-tuning brand colors, shuffling content around, and building a ton of new widgets. But none of these made a real difference. So they hired me to improve their site, and one of the first questions I asked was: who are we building this for? Not getting a clear answer was a big aha moment. Suddenly it was obvious why they were doing those trivial things instead of doing something that moves the needle.

Knowing your ideal client is crucial, since it affects every decision that follows. If you're assuming that they think about your product the same way you do, you're missing lots of opportunities. What you need to do is step into their shoes, understand their needs, and then align your website accordingly. So once they come, they feel comfortable, like they're moving through a familiar space, or among friends—not like they're entering a hostile environment, where clicking on the wrong button will make them halt, thinking about what went wrong, and eventually make them run out of there to some more welcoming place where they'll take better care of themselves.

Since you don't want that scenario for your users, you have to figure out why they're coming to your site. 

What are they trying to accomplish? Or what information are they looking for? Can they do it easily? Are there any obstacles getting in their way? How can you support them in that regard?

What do you actually want them to do, think, or feel once they're there?

How do you describe and present the offering so they can easily get it? Are they comparing you to your competitors—and if so, based on what criteria? Are there any repeated frustrations they have with similar products? Are they maybe stressed, or under what circumstances are they using it? Are they experienced with the technology?

What do they generally value - time, clarity, security? How can you increase their trust in your business with your web pages? Where are they coming from, what do they already know about you? Is there anything they probably don't know about your company that would make a big difference? What can you do to delight them? Are all these people similar to each other, or are there multiple groups?

And so on.

Understanding your users will heavily shift your perspective on how you approach building your website, and once you fit the way they think, it'll make your life so much easier because you'll finally know what you should do.

As Alan Dib puts it: "You need to enter the conversation that's already going on in the minds of your ideal prospects."

They're coming to your website to get something done for themselves, and your job is to support them so they can do it quickly and without hassle.

It's not about having a "world-class", "industry-leading" or "cutting-edge" website (unless you work at a corporation and you're trying to please your boss), but the only one you should be delighting is your user persona.

No matter what advanced technology you're implementing or how flashy your interface looks, if you fail on this, you're just burning a shitload of money and spending months, maybe even years, on doing things that won't pay off.