Let it be the loud one

Founders have asked me to make the marketing site behave like the product. It’s the wrong ask.

“We love our product. It does this. We want to see more of that on the marketing site.”

I get some version of that sentence constantly, and it is backwards.

It makes sense that it happens. Founders are product people.

They built the product first, they live inside it, and so the website gets handed down the product’s rules like a hand-me-down coat. Same restraint, same logic, same everything.

Here’s the thing: your marketing site and your product are siblings, not twins.

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One of them is the expressive one. Talks at dinner, tells the story, gets everybody excited about the family. That’s your marketing site, and its whole job is being gregarious and making information become interesting.

The other one is measured. Logical, a little reserved, deeply useful. That’s your product, and its job is function without being too complicated.

They’re obviously related. Same palette, same type, you’d pick them out of a lineup as family.

But function comes with rules that storytelling and garnering interest should not obey.

Watch what happens with color.

On a marketing site, red is an accent. In a product, red means something broke. Yellow and orange mean something is about to. You can use all three of those negative colors on a website, sparingly, and nobody thinks something is broken (mostly).

Layout’s the same story. A marketing page can (and should) change shape between sections, because being surprising is part of the point. A product that changes shape every screen is unusable.

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Dabble is the cleanest example I’ve got from Conversion Factory's archives.

The sections on their site are genuinely distinct from each other and they use a broad spectrum of color.

And then the product is stripped way down, because a writer is in there to write.

Same family, different kids.

Stop asking your marketing site to behave like your product.

Let it be the loud one.

— Zach 😎