What do we mean by ‘strategy’ in web design?
Roger Martin spent decades studying how organizations make decisions, first as a management consultant, then as the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto (from where I graduated in 2017!), and eventually as one of the most widely read writers on business strategy in the world. His central argument, developed across several books and hundreds of essays, is deceptively simple: a plan is not a strategy. A list of goals is not a strategy. A vision of where you want to be is not a strategy.
Strategy, in Martin's definition, is an integrated set of choices that positions you to win. The key word is integrated. Not a collection of good ideas sitting next to each other, but a set of choices that reinforce each other, where each decision makes the other decisions more powerful rather than less. A strategy is coherent in the way that a well-designed object is coherent. Remove one element and the whole thing is weaker. Every part is doing work that supports the other parts.
When Martin says strategy positions you to win, he means something specific. Winning is not simply succeeding, it is succeeding in a way that is not equally available to everyone. It is finding a position where your particular strengths, applied to a particular set of choices, produce outcomes that a competitor making different choices cannot easily replicate. Strategy is not about being better at the same thing. It is about being different in a way that matters to the right people.
I think about this definition often when I am working on a website brief. Because most conversations about web design strategy are not conversations about strategy at all. They are conversations about goals. What do you want your website to accomplish? What does your ideal client look like? What feeling do you want visitors to have when they land on your homepage? These are useful questions but they are not strategic questions. They are the preconditions for strategy. Strategy begins when you start making choices, when you decide what this site will do and what it will not do, who it is for and who it is explicitly not for, what it will say and what it will leave out on purpose.
The design parallel
Designers have been grappling with the same distinction for over a century, under different language but with the same underlying concern.
The Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919, was fundamentally an argument against decoration that was not doing work. The school's foundational critique of Victorian design was that it had become additive, that ornamentation had proliferated without purpose, that the surface of objects was being covered in visual noise that communicated nothing beyond a desire to appear elaborate. The Bauhaus response was not minimalism for its own sake, but it was the insistence that every element of a designed object should be earning its place by contributing to the object's function.
“Strategy is about being different in a way that matters to the right people”
This is what Gropius meant when he described the Bauhaus goal as the unity of all creative art under the primacy of architecture. Not that buildings were the most important art form, but that architecture was the discipline that most rigorously demanded that every choice serve the whole. A wall is not decorative. A window is not decorative. Every element is structural, and the structure is the expression of a set of choices about what the building is trying to do.
The same principle applies to a website. Every element is either earning its place or it is not. The headline either tells the right person she is in the right place, or it does not. The navigation either makes the next step obvious, or it introduces friction that sends her elsewhere. The testimonials either appear at the moment she needs reassurance, or they appear at the bottom of a page she has already decided to leave. None of these are aesthetic decisions in the narrow sense. They are strategic decisions that happen to be expressed through design.
I’ve read Roger Martin’s Playing to Win several times and I am forvever a fangirl!
When design and strategy are separated, what you usually get is a site that has been executed competently but positioned incoherently. The visual elements are attractive. The copy is serviceable. But the choices do not reinforce each other. The headline is speaking to one type of client, the services page is structured for another, the portfolio is selected to impress a third. The site feels like it was assembled by people who were each doing their job well but who were not working from the same understanding of what the site was trying to accomplish.
This is what Martin would recognise as a plan rather than a strategy. A collection of reasonable things that add up to less than the sum of their parts.
What strategy actually requires
For a service business website, the strategic choices that matter most are not the visual choices. They come before the visual choices. They are the choices about who this site is specifically for, what it is specifically claiming, and what evidence it will marshal in support of that claim.
The first choice is the hardest: who is this site not for? Most founders resist this question because it feels like leaving money on the table. If the site is specific enough to speak directly to one type of client, will it alienate everyone else? The answer, in practice, is the opposite. A site that speaks to everyone speaks to no one with enough specificity to create the feeling of being understood. And it is the feeling of being understood that converts a visitor into an enquiry.
“The headline either tells the right person she is in the right place, or it does not. The navigation either makes the next step obvious, or it introduces friction that sends her elsewhere. The testimonials either appear at the moment she needs reassurance, or they appear at the bottom of a page she has already decided to leave. None of these are aesthetic decisions in the narrow sense. They are strategic decisions that happen to be expressed through design.”
The discipline of specificity is where most website strategies collapse. The founder who has been told to niche down hears this as a constraint, as a narrowing of possibility. But in design terms, specificity is what makes everything else work. A specific understanding of who the site is for gives you criteria for every subsequent decision. The headline either speaks to that person or it does not. The portfolio selection either demonstrates relevant work or it does not. The structure of the services page either mirrors the decision-making process of that specific person or it introduces confusion. Without the specificity, these decisions are made by instinct or by convention, and they frequently point in different directions.
The second strategic choice is what the site is claiming. Not what services are offered, but what changes for the client after working with you. Most service business websites describe deliverables. What you receive, what is included, how long it takes. These descriptions allow comparison, and comparison on deliverables almost always resolves to price. The site that describes outcomes rather than deliverables is making a different kind of claim, one that is harder to compare and harder to undercut.
The third strategic choice is the evidence that will support the claim. Claims without evidence are assertions. They may be true but they require the prospective client to take them on faith, which is a significant ask from a site she landed on ten seconds ago. Evidence comes in specific forms: testimonials that describe outcomes rather than experiences, case studies that show the work in enough context that the prospective client can see herself in the situation, and the quality of thinking visible in the content itself, which is the most underrated form of evidence for a knowledge-based service business.
Strategy as constraint that enables
There is a paradox at the heart of strategic design that the Bauhaus architects understood and that most conversations about website strategy miss entirely. Constraint is not the enemy of creativity. It is the condition that makes creativity possible.
An unconstrained design problem produces paralysis or incoherence. When everything is possible, there is no basis for choosing one thing over another. The designer is left making decisions by taste or trend or convention, none of which are in service of anything specific. The result is a site that could have been designed for anyone, which means it works for no one in particular.
A well-defined strategic constraint gives the designer something to work against. The constraint is: this site is for established Canadian women founders whose businesses have outgrown their online presence, who are charging premium rates and whose websites are not reflecting the level at which they are operating. Every design decision can be evaluated against that constraint. The typography either communicates the professionalism of someone operating at that level or it does not. The use of space either signals confidence or it signals anxiety about whether there is enough content. The colour palette either reflects the specific emotional register of the business or it borrows someone else's register without earning it.
The constraint does not limit what the site can look like. It determines what the site should look like, which is an entirely different and more useful kind of guidance. It is the difference between a designer who is making aesthetic choices and a designer who is making strategic choices that are expressed aesthetically.
This is also why a strategic site is more durable than a decorative one. A decorative site ages because trends change and what looked current in one year looks dated the next. A strategic site ages more slowly because its choices are grounded in something that does not change with trends, which is the specific situation of the specific person it was built for. The positioning may need updating as the business evolves. The visual execution may need refreshing as conventions shift. But the underlying logic of why every choice was made remains valid as long as the business is serving the same type of client with the same type of work.
Where strategy becomes visible
Strategic websites do not announce their strategy. This is one of the things that makes them hard to reverse-engineer by looking at them. What you see is a site that feels right, that makes the right things obvious, that creates a sense of confidence about the person behind it without being able to locate exactly where that confidence is coming from.
What you are actually experiencing is the accumulated effect of a large number of choices that are all pointing in the same direction. The homepage headline speaks to the specific situation of the ideal client. The about page connects the founder's background to the client's problem rather than simply listing credentials. The services page describes what changes rather than what is delivered. The testimonials appear at the moments of maximum hesitation rather than bunched at the bottom of a page. The visual hierarchy makes the most important information land first without the visitor having to hunt for it.
None of these are dramatic design moves. They are the result of having a clear enough understanding of what the site is trying to accomplish that the right choice at each moment becomes relatively obvious. Strategy does not make design easier in the sense of requiring less craft. It makes design easier in the sense of providing criteria, and criteria are what allow a designer to be decisive rather than indecisive, coherent rather than eclectic.
For the established woman founder who is building a serious service business and whose website is not keeping up with where she is, the question is not what her site should look like. It is what her site should be arguing, and to whom, and with what evidence. The visual execution is the expression of the answers to those questions. When the answers are clear, the execution follows from them. When the answers are vague, the execution becomes decoration.
The strategic website as a business position
Martin's definition of strategy ends with the phrase “positions you to win.” It is worth sitting with what that means for a service business website specifically.
Winning for an established founder is not having the most traffic. It is having the right conversations. It is being found by the prospective clients who are the best fit for the work, at the moment they are ready to invest, and having a site that gives them enough confidence in the time they spend there to reach out. It is commanding the rates the work deserves without the site undermining those rates before the conversation begins. It is building an online presence that makes the referral's job easier, because when she sends someone to the site the site does the work of confirming the recommendation rather than complicating it.
This is a position. It is not equally available to everyone. It requires making choices that others are not making, about who you are specifically for and what you are specifically claiming and how you are specifically proving it. It requires the discipline of specificity that most founders find uncomfortable until they experience the result, which is a site that reliably attracts the right people and reliably converts them into conversations.
Strategy in web design is not a mood board of intentions. It is the set of integrated choices that make a specific position legible, credible, and worth acting on.
For Canadian women founders who are building service businesses at a premium level and want a website that reflects that, this page outlines how Gumptious approaches that work.
If you already know your site needs work and want to talk through it, get in touch here.
