It's a website, not a place

Most managers where I work believe that our website's purpose is to be a online copy of their physical service. This is, to me, a fundamental misunderstanding of what the web is for; and one which has wide-reaching consequences.

The prevailing metaphor at work is that of the website as, literally, a site: an extra location in which a service is delivered. Both managers and clients would expect a service to be the same whatever physical site it's delivered at; managers would also expect to have a large measure of control over the behaviour of users at a physical location. These expectations carry over to the web.

To ensure consistency of service across the "sites", any object that is present at a physical site must be put online; any information that would be given out by a staff member, likewise. When the department creates a poster, it's put online as a pdf: it's on the wall at a physical location, so must be "on the wall" at the online "location". Staff members may direct clients to other online resources; endless "our favourite links" pages are born so that the same resources may be ignored by legions of online users.

And managers expect users to be under their control online in the same way that they are at a physical location. A member of staff can direct a user to read information in a specific order, or to explore options other than the one they have set their mind on. On the web, this expectation results in paths through content that reflect the service's idea of how the information "should" be used, and in a tendency to put barriers in the way of users getting what they came for (I should stress that this is done with the best possible intentions).

My advice to managers: the website is not another location. It does not follow the same rules as physical locations. You can't control users in the same way, nor does it help you to try. Most importantly, people come to a website for very different reasons from those that send them to talk to a staff member. If you think of the website as just another location, you miss the key point: that websites are there to complement, not replace, your existing staffed services.