Nathaniel Whittemore

Which gets to our sixth problem that sites solve, which is audience fit.

Downloadable documents tend to force people to flatten everyone into an imaginary average reader.

Websites create a much better canvas for helping people navigate through the experience based on who they are and what information they're trying to get.

Sites also add easier and more native action ability.

When the report says something important or the deck recommends an action, that action necessarily has to happen elsewhere.

At best, you have a PDF that opens up, you guessed it, a website.

If you just build the thing as a website in the first place, the artifact can actually hold the action layer natively.

Websites also increased artifact reusability.

This goes hand in hand with the first problem we solved around currency, but web work is modular by nature.

A section can link out, a chart can embed elsewhere, a page can expand, a private version can become a public one, a proposal can become a client portal, a report can become a hub, a training page can become part of onboarding.

Instead of documents getting copied and degraded each time, they can build on top of each other and compound.

And as they compound, you can see who's actually interacting.

Sending a deck out is dropping something into the void and hoping it works.

A site, if designed well, can produce signal around what got read, what got clicked, what got searched, what got shared, what got revisited, what got abandoned.

The feedback means the artifact itself can become improvable.

And there are so many use cases, sales, training, fundraising, internal communications, change management, where understanding where the message actually landed is essential for whatever the next steps are.

Last couple problems that websites can help with.

The next is presentation.

A spreadsheet looks like a spreadsheet.

A PDF feels final but inert.