Goals of Your Website

Determine the goals of your website. Why do you want a website? Some typical reasons for putting up a website are to:

• Improve visibility and reputation of the company or organization
  
• Sell goods or services online
  
• Disseminate information / educate people
  
• Build relationships with customers or members
  
• Encourage potential customers to contact you to complete a sale
  
• Make available product information and price lists to distributors
  
• Make available product information and price lists to customers
  
• Offer customer service, technical support, other online services that you currently
  
• Build brand awareness
  
• Encourage site visitors to take action on some issue or program

 

Define Your Audience for the Website

Who are your target audiences for your website?

• Present customers
  
• Present distributors
  
• Potential new customers
  
• Potential new distributors

(Include information regarding demographics, technical capabilities, geographical location, etc.) Rank each audience in order of importance.

Do you want to reach remote and international customers, broaden your market or audience, or better serve your current customers?

What is it they would like to see on your site? What information can you provide them? What are they looking for? What will they expect your site to do for them? On which sites do these target viewers currently spend their Internet time?

 

Determine the Content of Your Website

Where will the content for this website project come from? Is it existing, or will it have to be written? How much of the content will need to be regularly updated?

 

Look at other Websites for inspiration

Look at other websites for inspiration, especially your competition.

• Which websites have you seen that you feel are particularly effective?
  
• Which websites have you seen that are visually pleasing?
  
• Which websites have you seen that are not visually pleasing?

 

Determine Activities and Features on your Website

It's a proven fact that the more your visitors interact with your web site, the more comfortable they become. And the more comfortable they become, the more likely they are to make purchases. Determine what kind of activities you want your customers to be able to do on your website.

Are your customers asking you if you have a website? Are your customers local, national or international? Do you want to set up an e-commerce site where potential customers can learn about and purchase your products? Do you want a brochure site with information about your company and where potential customers can go to purchase your products? Do you want to gather information about your customers in order to market to them directly?

Some common activities and features are:

• Shopping - Selling your products or services online can take many forms, from a simple email to you listing the products they want to credit card transactions online
• Registration - A method in order to gather emails of customers, potential customers or interested parties
• Requesting information - An activity to efficiently answer questions visitors to your site may have
• Searching a database - If your site is very complex, with a lot of information and many pages, being able to search your website for specific information will save time for the visitor
• Uploading files - Does your business require information be sent to you that would increase the efficiency of your operation by having the customer upload information
• Discussion forums - A way to have your customers interact with each other and your business
• Conduct an online survey - They'll be able to voice their opinions about your business, and you'll learn a lot about what they like (and don't like) about your products or service.
• Forms, such as an online suggestion box - Allows visitors to easily submit or request information. This is a great way to get your customers involved with your products or services. Let them suggest products they'd like to see featured, recommend ways to improve your product, or tell you what they think of your merchandise.
  
• Message Boards - Visitors can leave or respond to messages.
  
• Photo Galleries - display graphical information on your products or services
  
• Polls - a one question poll to gather feedback from your customers
  
• Inventory Management - automatic updating of your inventory
  

 

Budget Requirements

Website projects typically start at under a thousand dollars and go up to several thousand depending on the complexity and size of the site you would like. In addition to the cost of designing and developing your site, you need to consider these additional costs:

• domain name registration
  
• site hosting
• site development
• content writing
  
• site maintenance

 

Timeline

When do you want your website to be live on the Internet?

Consider doing a phased-in approach to your website. Have a small site built first, learn how to drive traffic to the site and then add more activities and features to your site to keep visitors coming back.

 

Analytics And Performance Measurement

In order to implement successful changes, it is important to benchmark your efforts.

For the new website this means tracking analytics from day one and monitoring the effectiveness of any additions or amendments.

Different techniques work to varying degrees for different websites so there is no one size fits all solution. Learn what works for your website and use this information to improve or optimize your marketing efforts.