While the technology is new, the pattern is familiar.

The tools we use to build websites are changing faster than ever. New AI builders launch every month. Templates evolve. Platforms shift their pricing, their features, even their values.

The marketing on every one of these tools is designed to make you confident enough to buy. Look how easy it is to build a website with AI. Then you get into it and realize there’s more to this than the homepage promised.

Five years ago the pitch was the template will solve it. Now it’s AI will solve it. The frame is the same. What actually makes a website work is knowing what to prioritize. That doesn’t come from your platform. It comes from your strategy.

Strategy is what survives the next platform shift.

This is the first piece in a four-part series walking through Maple’s framework for a connection-based website. We start where every meaningful project starts: with the thinking, not the tools.

Everyone is optimizing for attention, but you have another option.

You can create a connection-based website.

A connection-based website is one that builds enough trust with the people you serve that they feel safe taking the next step with you. The next step matters. If your site doesn’t offer one, people visit, they leave, and you have no way to follow up. The whole point of a website is to turn visits into relationships.

It’s not a brochure. It’s not a funnel. It’s a system that works in the background, turning visits into registrations, donations, clients, and impact.

The thing most people get wrong is treating the website as a thing. It’s a living system. It reflects how well you understand who you serve, how clearly you tell your story, how consistently you reach the people you want to reach, and how openly you listen to what they tell you back.

This isn’t theory. Before Maple, I directed a small library at Cornell. The internet had already changed what libraries were for. People weren’t coming to find a recipe or a fact, search did that. They were coming to find a place worth being in, around the things they cared about. So we deprioritized the cataloging system, organized the books more like a bookstore so people could browse, and built the calendar around events and community. Same principles, different medium. A website is the digital version of the same question: is this a place worth being in?

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The Four Pillars of a Connection-Based Website

We’ve built our framework around four pillars. Each pillar holds four skills. That gives sixteen yes-or-no questions you can ask of any website, including your own.

• Strategy. The thinking behind your site. Who it’s for, why it exists, and how you stay in conversation with your audience.
• Tools. The systems that keep your site running, growing, and reaching people on a rhythm.
• Content. What your site says, and how it’s organized so people can actually find what they came for.
• Design. The look and feel that makes your message land.

Most people, when they hit a wall, blame the wrong pillar. They reach for a redesign when what they actually need is clarity about who they serve. They reach for a new tool when what they need is a clearer story. Strategy is almost always the leverage point.

We’ve covered why strategy outlives any specific tool, what a connection-based website is actually doing, and the four pillars that make it work. From here we go one layer deeper into the first pillar, the one that almost always sets the ceiling for everything else.

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The Strategy Pillar in Depth

The Strategy pillar asks a single question: do you deeply understand who you serve, and how you stay in conversation with them?

It breaks down into four skills. Each one is a yes-or-no question you can answer honestly today.

Audience: Are you clear about who your website is for?

This is your ability to deeply understand and connect with the people you serve, and to write content that makes them feel seen.

The audience question is rarely are you clear. It’s are you clear enough to make decisions. If you can’t write your homepage because you keep trying to please everyone, your audience definition needs work.

The signal you’re capable: you address concrete problems using phrases your audience uses, and they reflect that language back to you. The signal you’re exceptional: you regularly validate and refine your messaging with interviews and tests, and you can cite messages where a customer says this is exactly me.

Smallest next step. Write one document that defines your ideal customer along with their desires, obstacles, and the solution you offer.

Story: Do you share more than just logistical information on your website? Do you share why you do what you do?

This is your ability to explain your motivations and perspective with narrative that builds trust and connection with readers.

Most website ‘about pages’ list credentials. The good ones tell a story. They show the moment of realization, the work that came after, and the thread that ties today’s offer back to the origin. People don’t commit to products. They join stories and imagine themselves doing the same kind of work.

The signal you’re capable: you share specific moments, values, and decisions that build trust and context for your work. The signal you’re exceptional: you maintain a library of stories (origin moments, client wins, useful failures) and use them across pages and channels to deepen connection.

Smallest next step. Write two posts: one about your audience’s story (before and after), and one about your own origin story (why you’re qualified to be their guide).

Outreach: Do you have a consistent strategy for attracting the right people to your work?

This is your ability to consistently show up where your ideal customers are, providing value and building relationships over time.

Outreach isn’t traffic. Traffic is a number. Outreach is the deliberate practice of showing up where the people you serve already are, with something useful to offer. Email lists, podcasts, social channels, partnerships, and referrals all count. What matters is whether you can describe yours in one sentence, and whether you actually do it on a rhythm you can sustain.

The frame that changed our outreach: always be helpful, not always be selling. People don’t have a content problem anymore. They have a who do I want to spend time with problem. Generosity is how you answer that question.

The signal you’re capable: you’ve identified a priority outreach channel and have a plan to show up consistently with value. The signal you’re exceptional: you run small tests, track replies and connections, and evolve your outreach system to keep opening new opportunities.

Smallest next step. Choose the channel you’ll focus on first and decide how you’ll measure its impact.

Feedback: Have you established a system to regularly collect feedback on your site?

This is your ability to grow and pivot your work based on feedback from the people you serve.

This is the one most people skip. A connection-based website has feedback loops built in. Surveys after events. Reply-to invitations in newsletters. Testimonial drives at the right moments. Quick polls when you launch something new. Without feedback you’re guessing. With it, your site keeps getting better at saying what your readers actually need to hear.

The signal you’re capable: you place intentional prompts (surveys, testimonial asks) and review the responses on a regular rhythm. The signal you’re exceptional: you design questions that surface deeper motivations, and you use those insights to change copy, offers, and user experience.

Smallest next step. Place a survey on your website and schedule the time you’ll review the answers.

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Before you read on, take five to ten minutes and run your own site through the assessment.

Example Time ↓

Strategy in Practice: Plant Cunning Conference

To make this real, we ran a live hot-seat session with AC Stauble, who runs the Plant Cunning Conference and the Plant Cunning podcast. AC has been a Maple client for years. She scored 100% on the Tools pillar (no surprise there) and flagged Strategy, specifically Audience and Feedback, as where she felt least confident.

What surfaced in the session is a great example of how strategy work actually moves.

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The two-crowds insight

AC walked in with a strong focusing sentence: “My website helps plant people and herbalists build in-person connections and learn from teachers directly, by offering an in-person event with high-quality teachers.”

Solid starting point. But when we dug in, AC identifed that the conference actually serves two distinct audiences.

There’s the self-study, family-herbalist crowd, often longtime practitioners who treat the conference as a yearly retreat. They come for the depth of teaching, the chance to learn directly from elders, and a few days of focused study away from daily life.

There’s the activist-herbalist crowd, often building skills to support relief and mutual aid work in their communities. They come for the network, the practice, and the shared purpose. Many contribute back through volunteering or come on scholarship, which is part of how the conference stays alive.

Both groups make the conference what it is. The first brings the weight of years and the steadiness that keeps a gathering of this size running. The second brings the urgency and the next generation of practice. Same gathering, very different language, pictures, and reasons to come. AC put it cleanly: “The pictures I would use for the one versus the other, and the words I would use, are very different.”

The herbal business owners reframe

Inside the session, a third audience came into focus: herbal business owners. Many of the activist herbalists are running small herbal businesses. So are many of the second crowd. Vendors fit here too.

People will spend money on their business before themselves.

That single insight reframes the whole conference. It’s not just a personal learning event. For a meaningful slice of the audience, it’s a professional development decision. That changes the language on the homepage, the schedule emphasis, the way vendors get talked about, and the case for the full-price ticket.

Applying the DOS framework

We worked through the DOS framework next. For each audience segment, we asked:

• Desire. What did they actually want when they decided to come?
• Obstacle. What was in the way? What objections almost stopped them?
• Solution. What does the conference offer that addresses both?

The obstacles list filled fast: comfort, time off work, price, travel, weather, do I belong, will I learn anything, and what’s the return on investment.

Most of those objections aren’t answered on the current homepage. They’re answered on the FAQ page. But, as AC pointed out, “somebody has to be interested enough to go to that page versus just scrolling down.”

The quick win: a calibrated testimonial drive

The highest-leverage next step we identified together was a testimonial drive built on top of the existing site.

Not a generic leave a review form. A calibrated one. The questions are written to elicit the specific quotes that address the specific objections AC just named. One question about comfort. One about whether vendors did well. One about the food and the camping. One about whether the person felt like they belonged.

Then those quotes get placed on the homepage, in the same sections where the objections live, alongside photos from past conferences.

It’s a small piece of work. Probably a couple of hours of setup, plus follow-up. But it does what no amount of design tweaking can do. It lets past attendees say what AC herself can’t say without sounding like a sales pitch.

“Seth Godin says, Marketing can all come down to one idea, which is, people like us do things like this. When people see that they belong, and they see people like themselves doing things, they can imagine themselves doing the thing [ like attending an event ], and that imagination is probably the most powerful driver of commitment.”

— workshop insight

What AC took with her from the hot-seat

We closed the session by asking each participant what they were taking with them. AC named the DOS framework as the unlock. “Thinking about the DOS framework from each audience was really helpful, to be able to speak to their pain points or objections or obstacles, and then offer the solution.”

Eve, who joined as another participant, said it cleaner: “I have a lot of homework to do to clarify where I’m going.”

That’s exactly what Strategy work is supposed to do. Rather than giving you answers, it gives you a clear list of decisions you now know you need to make.

Want help with those decisions? That’s what a strategy call is for.

Pick Your Next Step

If you took the quiz, look at your lowest-scoring skill in the pillar you want to focus on first. For most people, that’s Strategy.

Each skill has a small, concrete starting point you can finish this month:

• Audience. Write one paragraph defining your reader’s desires and obstacles.
• Story. Draft one origin-story post and one audience-story post for your About page.
• Outreach. Pick one channel and commit to a rhythm you can sustain.
• Feedback. Add a survey or testimonial form to your site this week.

Pick one. Finish it before you start the next. If you need more time, no worries. This framework is something you can return to again and again.

DIY doesn’t mean doing it alone. The framework gives you the questions. The community at Maple is here for the rest of it.

Related Resources

• Watch the workshop replay
• Take the Website Impact Quiz
• Book a strategy call
• plantcunningconference.com

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