Last Saturday, I couldn't find my favorite pair of shoes. I looked everywhere downstairs, then finally went upstairs to look in the closet. Feeling frustrated and like I needed to take control, I started pulling clothes out of the closet, folding them, rehanging them, and even throwing some away. Then, I decided to reorganize my dresser drawers, getting progressively more frustrated at the disarray at which I was storing everything. Next thing I knew, I was in the car, heading to the store, buying new bins and organizers for storage. Too much money later, I headed back home, and began assembling containers and reorganizing. By the end of the day, I was tired, frustrated, and had some how managed to create a bigger mess than I had originally started with. To add insult to injury, I still could not find my favorite pair of shoes anywhere.

While I somehow doubt many care about my poor closet organization skills, we can draw a pretty useful analogy here to what happens with website management: you have to be able to define a problem before you can solve it.

Because I didn't define the problem (finding my shoes), there was no way that I could throttle my efforts to solve it. I got frustrated and immediately felt like I needed to fix everything at once.

When you find a shortcoming on your site, it's important to be able to define the problem - not the solution. If you cannot define the problem right away, then that is the problem.

For example, let's say you are seeing drops in traffic to your site. The problem may be that you need to do more marketing - easy enough. But, another issue may be that you had turnover at the organization and now no one knows how to update the content. Therefore, the content is getting stale, so no one is visiting because there's no new information. If you had chosen to do more marketing to drive traffic, you may have sent a lot of people to your site which has stale information - not good for credibility and certainly not a long-term solution to the issue at hand.

Being able to define a problem on your site is fundamental to finding a solution. Not unlike my closet scenario, throwing random solutions at a problem will likely result in some benefit. But, if you still can't find your shoes, then it's difficult to justify the expense of all of the other components,and you never actually solve the real problem.

Front-loading an issue with discovery - whether it be looking at site analytics, reviewing market trends, or just surveying users - can be extremely useful in helping to define what the actual problem is. Taking some time to sort out what the issues are will help exponentially in finding an appropriate solution.

Interested in reading more? Check out:

Solutioneering, or putting solutions before problems

Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign