Developing or creating a new website for your business without a website strategy is like someone who is trying to run a business without a business plan. Having a web site strategy and working to evaluate the results of your strategy will make sure you are meeting or achieving your business objectives/ goals and help insure your web site's success.
A quick search with Google, Yahoo! or any of the search engines will reveal millions of web sites, the majority of which were created with a focus on publishing content about a business or product, with little thought of how practical the web site really is or what the site is supposed to do.
Today I would like to concentrate on two elements should be taken into consideration when we build website strategy Wants vs. Needs It's important to distinguish between wants and needs and focus on functionality necessary to reach specific business goals with your web site.
From my perspective I would say we should have a clear vision when we plan to create a website and identifing customer or client needs.
Developing a marketing strategy is not just limited to your web site goals, but your overall marketing plan and what advertising, marketing and customer service goals are best suited for your web site.
More often than not, a web site is treated as an afterthought without a specific purpose beyond offering basic company information and an e- mail form. We view a web site as an interactive extension of a company, with few limitations.
Setting Web Site Goals.
The first step is to list all the specific tasks you want your website to accomplish. Besides offering a potential customer information about your company services, what should your web site "do?"
Should your website help you to accomplish E-commerce? Serve students for online learning? Distribute information to your customers? Offer customer service? Should your web site be used as a recruitment tool? Or for advertising and promotion?
Creating a list of priorities
The most important thing to consider when building a website, is the end user and what he/she wants. To this end, it's important to create user personas, a set of imaginary people that describe the end user or users of the site. Personas allow us to create user-centric designs and ensure that we focus on and empathize with the people we are endeavoring to reach. In practical terms, a user persona is quite similar to a character sheet in a role-playing game.
As you list what you want your site to do, prioritize the list into three categories:
1) Primary, "must do" goals, how we help persona achieve goals
2) Secondary, "it would be nice if . . ." and what we should do to describe our solution to persona
3) Next phase, "if we have to postpone this, it wouldn't hurt us." When grouping your web site goals, keep in mind the one overwhelming reason for having a web site in the first place and compare it to each of the goals as you prioritize them.
After establishing clearly what a client's stated web site goals should be, we compare these goals with a client's expectations regarding their web site, current Internet technology and their marketing and advertising plan. Separating wants and needs.
Ordering Web Site Priorities
Having your priorities outlined and your goals detailed will help you to determine what you really need. Go through your priority list and measure it against your web site goals. If a web site feature you want will help you to accomplish a specific task then include it as long as it utilizes Internet technology or browser technology that is widely supported by today's browsers.
If you have items on your list that don't match your web site goals well, it's probably a good idea to hold off implementing them. Finally, having a priority list will make it easier to decide what to include or exclude in your web site when working within a limited web site budget.
10 Tips for a Great Web Site
1) Making great first impressions is important and your web site may be the first exposure to your company a potential customer experiences. Strike a balance between content and design.
2) Avoid focusing exclusively on graphic design rather than making the web site useful. Give your web site visitors a reason to visit your site often.
3) Create simple navigation. Design your site so your users can go from one page to any other page. Avoid navigation schemes that rely on the user having to search for a secondary navigation menu or having to use their browser's "back" button in order to navigate.
4) Work on creating a web design that will respond to various screen sizes. This means the layout will change based on the visitor's screen size, and on smaller screens
5) Distribute your web site information on several pages so the user does not have to scroll often. By distributing your photographs and graphics over several pages, your pages will load faster.
6) Know who is coming to your site and how your site is being used on a monthly or quarterly basis. This information will be invaluable for updating or refocusing your site to better serve your target market or customers.
7) Update your site frequently and create a reason for your web site users to keep coming back. Repeat visits give you an opportunity to repeat your marketing message.
8) Capture information with your web site. Use forms, offers and promotions to get your web site users to tell you who they are and what they are interested in. Not only will this help you to design a more useful web site, collecting e-mail addresses can allow you to notify customers and potential customers about new products or services.
9) Review your web site goals quarterly. As the Internet evolves and as new technology becomes mainstream, it is good to review the purpose of your site and the usefulness of new tools and implement these new tools when they make sense.
10) Avoid "do-it-yourself web site design." Yes, there are programs that let you build your own web site. If you don't have experience in graphic design or producing professional web sites, hire a web development company with proven abilities to help you.
Thank You!
