Introduction to DEMOS - What Makes a Good Website?

In our last article, we confirmed How Important is a Website to my Business. It’s important. A good website plays a critical role in bringing in new customers by making all of your other marketing initiatives more effective and by helping potential buyers through their decision making process while on the site.

If you were paying attention, we qualified that statement. Not just any website, a good website. The next logical step will then be to discuss what makes a website “good”.

We’re going to approach this objectively. Your business has goals, and your website is one of the tools you have to achieve those goals. A “good” website is one that has all its parts aligned to helping you do that.

At Cantilever, we’ve got two jobs: we need to build you a great website, but we also need to be able to communicate with clients about what makes a website good, and why we advocate for any given plan. To help us talk about this, we developed an acronym called “DEMOS”, which stands for Discoverability, Ease of Use, Messaging, Offers, and Stability.

We use these 5 concepts because individually they each represent a critical aspect of your website, and together they help maximize the value you get from your site.

So we’re going to use DEMOS as our framework to talk about what makes a website good. This article will go over the 5 pillars at a high level, and the next 5 articles will cover each pillar in slightly more detail.

Introducing the Pillars of a Good Website

First, we need to introduce the 5 pillars and what they do.

‍Discoverability: Getting Users in the Door

Our first pillar is Discoverability, which focuses on how well your website acquires traffic. If nobody visits your site, then it doesn’t really matter how great the site is - it can’t do its job. Here we’re looking at your audience, and how brand’s content, both on and off the site, works to attract them.

Ease of Use: Making Your Site a Joy to Explore

Ease of Use is our second pillar, and it’s title is pretty self-explanatory. Once a user is on your site, how easy is it to find what they need and complete their tasks? This takes a hard look at your users, what they need, and how well your site meets those needs.

Messaging: Communicating Your Value

Messaging is the pillar that covers how well your website communicates your brand and its value. This include the words you use, how your information is organized, your visual identity and your web design choices.

Offers: Converting Visitors to Customers

When we talk about Offers in the context of websites, we're referring to the specific actions you want visitors to take that contribute to your business goals. This not only covers your “Contact Us” or ”Buy Now”, but also other asks that you make of users like “Watch a Video”, “Join our Newsletter” and so on. How effectively do you transact with users?

Stability: Ensuring Long-Term Reliability

Stability is the final pillar and it represents how stable and reliable your website is. This looks at your site’s technology, architecture and support systems. Anything that interferes with your site doing its job will negatively affect its stability.

Why Do We Use These Pillars?

We could talk about websites in a million different ways. So why have we settled on these 5 factors as the pillars of a great website?

These Pillars Help Simplify Complex Problems and Ideas

The web is evolving incredibly quickly - too quickly for industry insiders to keep up, let alone normal business owners. We created these pillars because it helps simplify a crazy complex landscape into a stable set of factors we can address with current and potential clients. These pillars are more resilient than technologies. AI Agents may have changed the tools and tactics that we use in Discoverability, but the fundamental need to effectively drive traffic to your site doesn’t change.

These Pillars Help You Address the Decision Making Process

In the last article, we talked about the Decision Making Process - the process that people go through when making a buying decision. We care about the Decision Making Process because if we understand how people make decisions, we can tailor our site to address the needs of people on each step of the journey, and make it more likely that they choose us.

The DEMOS pillars map well to the Decision Making Process. As we go about trying to tailor our site to the needs of a user in a given step, we can use the principles of these pillars to help guide our approach.

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As an example, while we’re trying to help our users through the Information Gathering step of the Decision Making Process, we can use the tools within Discoverability, Ease of Use and Messaging as we design our site. Discoverability will help introduce users to our brand, and give them an opportunity to consider us. Ease of Use will guide our approach to what information we provide, and how it’s organized, and Messaging will help us craft our pitch to the user about what we offer and why.

These Pillars Help You Have Targeted Impacts on your Business

Now generally speaking, all business decisions come down to money. If we’re considering making an investment into our website or any other initiative, we want to ensure that our investment makes sense from a business perspective.

When we crafted DEMOS, each pillar is designed to help you achieve given business objectives.

DEMOS PillarBusiness MetricsDiscoverabilityRevenue, Cost of AcquisitionEase of UseCost of Acquisition, Lifetime Customer ValueMessagingRevenue, Cost of Acquisition, Lifetime Customer ValueOffersRevenue, Cost of AcquisitionStabilityCost of Acquisition, Lifetime Customer Value

Mapping the DEMOS pillars to business metrics does a couple of things for us:

• First, it explains why investment is worth it. If we’re talking about a website’s Discoverability, we need a clear business reason to make it worth talking about.
• But second, this mapping gives you a few knobs to twiddle if you’re looking to make improvements to a specific metric.

If you want to see a general increase in revenue generated from your website, we can focus on Discoverability, Messaging and Offers as our priority. If you’re instead looking to increase your lifetime customer value, we can focus on Ease of Use, Messaging and Stability.

Your business goals should drive your strategy and approach. DEMOS helps you focus on your business first, and then make decisions about your website in logical way.

Wrapping Up

Today we introduced the 5 pillars

Things to Think About

• What business factors are most important to you right now? As you approach potential investment in your website, what business objectives are you looking to achieve?
• How well does your website address the different stages of the Decision Making Process? Are there any clear blind spots that you could address better?

What’s Next?

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to our Newsletter to get updated when future articles are released. We’ll be digging deeper into the 5 pillars, including strategy, tactics and practical approaches for your business.

If you’re ready to dive into the 5 pillars and start exploring how they affect your website and your business, the first pillar is Discoverability - dive right in!