There are several basic questions you'll want to answer before moving forward with a web site. Taking the time to carefully answer these questions now, and you avoid wasting your time and energy creating a purposeless web site that neither supports your goals, nor your customers' and prospects' needs.
''Purpose''
Form follows function. The content and design of your web site should reflect both why you are creating it and why people are visiting it. Answering these questions will help you focus on the message rather than the medium. Accordingly, start by focusing on the results you want to achieve from your web site.
1. What is the primary purpose of your web site?
Why are you creating a web site? What kind of results are you looking for? Are you looking for immediate response or paving the way for a more aggressive web presence in the future? Is your goal to sell a specific product or service, generate floor traffic, automate a business process, or support products and services you have already sold? Are you trying to position your business relative to your competition? Is your goal to reduce customer support costs? If you could communicate only one idea to your web site visitors, what would it be? How can you substantiate it? What evidence, or information, can you provide?
2. What are some of your other goals?
List some of the other objectives you would like your web site to achieve in order of importance.
3. What action do you want web site visitors to take?
Do you want them to request further information, visit your place of business, or purchase directly from your web site?
4. How are you going to measure the success of your web site?
Try to establish ways to quantify the success of your web sites. Whether you base success on number of visits, or quantity of sales, you need to determine a standard that measures success.
Success comes to the degree you identify your goals, make a realistic appraisal of the resources you have at your disposal, and identify ways to measure and track your objectives. The alternative is to waste a lot of time and money.
''Content''
You are only one-half of the equation. Your web site visitors are the other half. Successful web sites are built around the needs and wants of their visitors rather than the egos and enthusiasms of the web site creators. Search engine algorithms are based on content, so this is how they will find you! Success will come to the degree that you identify your web site visitors and their needs and then create a web site that satisfies those needs.
5. Who do you want to visit your web site?
The design and type of information you include in your web site should reflect the expectations of your customers, and this involves knowing who they are. Are you interested in attracting first-time buyers, repeat buyers, or step-up buyers looking for improved performance?
6. What types of information are they looking for?
If they are repeat customers, they probably already possess basic buying information and are more likely to be price- or feature-oriented than first-time buyers who are interested in a basic introduction to your product or service. There are several Keyword Selector tools out there that can help you determine which search terms are being used most frequently.
7. What types of information can you provide?
Your goal is to avoid the assumption that just because you know something, your prospective buyers also know it. Chances are, they don't. Educate your visitors. Your web site will succeed to the extent that you expand the market by educating them. From your entire universe of information about your field, your goal is to choose information that your web site visitors are searching for.
8. How often do you want web site visitors to return?
The more you want your web site visitors to return, the more you'll want to frequently update your site. Choose an authoring tool that will allow you to update your web site content, no matter what your technical skill level.
9. How can you build immediacy into your web site?
Your market is likely to have a short memory. If visitors don't immediately act, they might never act. What incentives can you offer to encourage your market to immediately respond to your offerings? Are there ways you can make your web visitors feel special and more likely to respond immediately?
Information is the core of a successful web site. Success comes from offering your web site visitors information that supports your goals.
''Design''
The design colors, fonts, layout, and organization of your web site should be influenced by the image you want to portray, as influenced by the market you want to attract and the content you're going to include. Your design needs to consider your target audience.
10. What type of image do you want to project?
Do you want to project an affordable or upscale image? Do you want to project a youthful or a more conservative image? If your target audience is the elderly, are the fonts on your web site adjustable?
11. What type of content will be included?
The balance of text and graphics is likely to play a key role in the organization and layout of your web site. Text-heavy web sites present an entirely different set of challenges than do web sites containing numerous images.
12. How much involvement do you want to include?
Are there ways that you can begin to help web site visitors sell themselves and encourage the sale by helping them prequalify themselves? Tools like financing and lease calculators can save a great deal of your sales staff's time.
13. What can you learn from your existing web site and other web sites out there?
What do you like about your existing web site? What don’t you like? Are there any web sites out there that you really like? It's important that your web site portrays a unique and consistent image, but at the same time, a lot can be learned from what others are doing. Learning from past experience and looking at other sites can be a great way to determine what you like and don’t like.
''Production''
Inventory your available resources. Whether this is personnel or money, you need to know what resources you have available. If you cannot support and maintain the web site you are looking to implement, you are wasting time and money.
14. What resources are available for creating your web site?
What printed media, video, photographs, documents, etc. do you have to provide content for your site? Who is going to gather these ingredients for you? Will it be you, your employees, or will you need outside services?
15. What Internet or desktop publishing skills do you, or your staff, possess?
Would you feel comfortable updating your own site? Should you choose having a dynamic web site, this is an option you have. Alternatively, your web services provider can be in charge of all updates and modifications.
The design of your web site and the level of visitor involvement you choose to allow should reflect your time and budget. If your resources are limited, you start out with a plain and simple web site, and improve it as your resources improve.
''Follow-up, Promotion, and Maintenance''
Web sites do not succeed on their own. Their success is based as much on management as on design. The best-looking, most content-filled web site will not succeed unless it is carefully integrated into your day-to-day marketing and sales activities. Like a garden, a web site requires constant attention.
16. Who is going to follow-up on comments or requests for information and sales?
The volume of email is certain to increase as your web site becomes more successful. Your web site is a communication vehicle, and is the preferred method of contact for many.
17. How are you going to promote your web site?
To succeed, web sites need to be promoted. At the very least, your web site address should be included in every advertisement and on every print communication you prepare including brochures, business cards, flyers, letterheads, newsletters, postcards, and posters. This will ensure that existing customers will become familiar with your web site address.
18. What search terms do you want to use to promote your web site?
It is important to bring your web site to the attention of search engines. What information categories should you concentrate on so that search engines can locate your web site? Optimize your site for these search terms. If your search terms are extremely competitive, hiring an SEO is usually the best route to take.
19. What web sites can contain links to your web site?
What can you offer to motivate others to include a link to your web site from theirs?
If you are a retailer, can you list your web site on your vendor's web sites? If you are a member of an association, can your web site address be included on their site? Portals?
20. How are you going to keep your web site fresh?
What can you do to encourage repeat visits? What types of information is likely to change? How often does new information become available? What types of information on your web site are appropriate for updating: products, procedures, prices or your commentary?
''Putting the Answers to Work''
These questions are by no means the only questions you'll be considering in this process. Additional questions requiring additional answers will come up as you take an increasingly detailed look at developing the content and design of your web site.
Did you notice that many of the questions are related? For example, the results you want to achieve and the type of visitors you want to attract determines the content and design.