Does Your Website Have a Specific Goal?
A website goal is more important than the layout of your website. You have to define a clear purpose for your website, or you can't expect your website to be successful.
Examples:
- To attract new customers
- To increase retention
- To inform
- To reduce office costs
- To conduct e-commerce
- To recruit employees
- To provide a portfolio of your work
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You can have multiple goals for your website. Your goals should be measurable otherwise you won't know if you reached them. For example, you can measure how many new customers you made through your website. You cannot, however, measure emotional based goals like "To look more professional".
Who is Your Target Audience?
You need to define target visitors for each website goal. Not everyone is an ideal customer, and not everyone can be your employee. You need to define target visitors for each website goal. Not everyone is an ideal customer, and not everyone can be your employee.
Here are the usual target visitors:
- Prospects
- Existing Customers / Members / Employees
- Vendors
- Investors
After Purpose and Target Visitors...
Now we start to get into the real web design process. Here are some of the steps we work on together:
- Identify high-level website sections to apply each Purpose on each Target Visitor.
- Trace how you will get visitors to those sections. This is the website navigation.
- Reveal your business or organizational look and feel. Do you have existing marketing? Logo? Color scheme? Photos?
- Template your design into our WebMaster CMS system.
- Fill in all the content.
- Assist the search engines so your target visitors have a better chance of finding you - Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
- Come back in six months and analyze your visitor statistics. Compare that to your business numbers. Are you meeting you goals? Can you identify website changes to reach or improve upon your goals.
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