What are website “pilot pages”? And why should you use them?

Great photo by Designecologist.

​We know a talented web designer who told us that websites age in dog years. That may well be true of the technology. But in this article, we’re going to talk about your branding and your messaging. 
 
If you’re considering a refresh of your site, or perhaps even a wholly new site, this article is for you. Even if a potential rework is way in the future, you can still learn some good time- and expense-saving tips here. So read on! 
 
Website in the spotlight
 
We have a client whose business recently pivoted from serving mid-level customers to very high-end customers. (We can’t give too much detail here, but there should be enough info for you to follow the story.) 
 
The high-end prospects would be more profitable for our client. Making this choice to pivot was the result of a lot of soul-searching and analytical number-crunching. It represented a switch from serving a greater number of decent-revenue-providing clientele to a smaller number of awesome-revenue-providing clientele. 
 
As we’d said, we’re gauzing up this story. But you now know enough to follow it—and to see the parallels that exist to your situation, and your website. 
 
Ah yes. The website. The moment this client of ours decided to pursue a newer, higher-end audience, their existing website (not to mention all of their other marketing materials) immediately became outdated. It was way “beneath” their new audience—and wholly lacking in the newly-refined service offerings they had developed. 
 
Our client knew that this would be coming. Recall all of the aforementioned soul-searching and number-crunching. 
 
So they called on us to help them create the new website. We don’t do this alone. We work closely with the client. They have a great web designer, with a full team, that we love. We also have some great video editors to help create the site’s embedded content (which we scripted). 
 
But here, in this article, we’d like to walk you through the process we employed—and get to those elusive “pilot pages” that we’d mentioned in the title. 
 
Starting wide
 
As we’d noted, the client had decided to serve a new audience. And if you’ve read any of our articles here at Copel Communications, you can practically do a drinking game for each time we mention “taking a customer-back approach.” We’re passionate about this. (Because it works!) 
 
In other words, start with the customer. Explore their needs. Then work backward to the marketing strategy and tactics. 
 
So here are the big things we did with this client, in order:

• Deeper dive customer discovery. Through a series of structured strategy sessions, we really dived into the new prospects they were targeting. What are their pain points? What are they doing now? What are their best alternative options, besides out client? What might “trigger” them to make a switch? Who are the secondary targets we needn’t address directly, but wouldn’t mind attracting? Who are the “tire kickers” we want to avoid engaging with? (We have a great article on that topic, by the way.) 

 

• Narrative creative concepts. Once we had nailed down the customer persona (sometimes called the “avatar” or ICP for Ideal Customer Profile), we worked up a number of written descriptions of what the new website would look and feel like. These “narrative creative concepts” are very time- and cost-efficient. They describe the theme, tone, and feel of a proposed new site’s treatment, talking about the imagery, copy, amount of white space, navigation, and so on. And we provided several to choose from, each with a slightly different creative approach. The client then picked their favorite. 

 

• Website wireframe. We then wrote this up, outline-style, and reviewed it with the client—moving, re-prioritizing, and adding and cutting as needed, until we had a nice tight version. (Want to learn more about how we do this—and you can, too? We’ve got a nice article you can check out.) 

 

• Pilot pages. No, we’re not gonna describe them here in this little bullet. These warrant their own subhead. 

 
Exciting new subhead: Pilot pages!
 
Mind you, all of the work we’d described above is upstream of the web designer. Why? Two reasons: 

• One: It’s essential to steer them in the right direction for what they will undertake. Not “kinda/sorta the right direction.” And that’s because of Reason Two: 

 

• Two: That’s a lot of people, working hard. It ain’t cheap. We’re frugal with our customers’ marketing spend here at Copel Communications. 

 
So what are these teased-to-death-by-now “pilot pages”? It’s actually really simple. Despite the wonderfully described tone from the chosen narrative creative concept, it’s time to create actual public-facing website copy at this point. 
 
So should you unleash your writer—even if it’s us—to pen all of these pages at once? You have, after all, an approved concept and a signed-off wireframe. 
 
Answer: No. 
 
Again, you want to be efficient and frugal. So go through your wireframe and pick out just a few—two, maybe three—pages that would be good tests of the final tone-and-feel verbiage. These will be your “pilot pages.” 
 
They’re easy to choose—but hard to write. Expect a bunch of revisions. But once you lock them down, the other pages go way, way faster. 
 
The obvious one to start with is the home page. That’s mandatory. After that, it depends on which one you think would be 1) difficult, 2) representative, and 3) a good model for subsequent/deeper pages. That last point is especially important if you’re going to be engaging a team of writers: You want them to be able to reference the approved pilot pages, and use them to make sure they’re sticking to the proper tone. 
 
Incidentally, once you have your approved pilot pages, you can then feed them, with confidence (along with the approved narrative creative concept and wireframe), to your web designer. From that point, it’s off to the races. 
 
Need help with your next website project? Contact us. We’ve done lots of these, and would be delighted to help with yours. 

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