The One Where Your Website Is A Sitcom

Pick your favorite sitcom. Any sitcom. What does it have in common with all other sitcoms? Aside from allegedly being funny?

Taken together, the episodes present a pretty well defined world. True followers know the characters and their worlds like family (a true "Friends" follower would instantly get the title of this post).

However, you need not have seen every episode to appreciate this world. And you need not have watched the series in sequential order. In fact, with most sitcoms, there is no real sequence, per se. Just a collection of linked individual episodes.

Compare that to, say, "Game of Thrones" or "House of Cards." Miss an episode there and you've missed a lot (unless your social network includes those who just can't resist posting spoilers).

I submit to you that your website is more like "Friends" than "House of Cards."

For years, storytelling has been a key part of a brand's marketing mix. But the term "storytelling" suggests a sequential narrative thread that echoes the arc of a storyline -- that begins with Introduction and Exposition, builds to a Climax, and then resolves in a Conclusion. The taxonomy of websites themselves reinforces this suggestion -- they're composed of "pages," like a book, which is read sequentially.

But a better way to think about a website is as a collection of episodes. All connected. All sharing common elements and themes. And with each page totally independent of the others.

Why does it matter if you think of this way? Because of how users navigate your site. You don't know where they'll come in. You don't know where they'll click once they're there. So the idea of leading them through a sequential story that begins at the home page and develops from there just doesn't work. The paths of users are just too random.

To accomodate that randomness, your site needs to have a self-contained story on every page. Try looking at it with that perspective, and see how it changes how you would organize the information on your site, or how you'd think about navigation, or how you'd design it or develop content.

And be sure to tune in for our next episode!