The Planning Process
Here are a few generic goals you need to embrace as you develop your site:
- Attracting visitors to the site.
- Making the site sticky – Making the site interesting enough that visitors will stay and explore.
- Building trust with your visitors
- Creating an impression consistent with your image
- Encouraging visitors to return.
- Getting conversion – what is it for me and how do I get it.
The basic website Development and Design project is:
Planning /Analysis -> Layout/Design/Story-Boarding -> Content ->
Development/Building -> Testing/Evaluating ->Marketing
Your first question when starting to plan for a website is to define where you are going. What is the purpose of our website? What is it that you wish it to accomplish objectively? Are you trying to generate leads? Sell a product? Support a product (improve customer service)? Sell a vision? Increase membership? Get people to vote for a particular person or amendment? Increase brand awareness? Define this before continuing. It should be an objective goal.
Next, you need to look at your objective from the perspective of your client, customer, or audience. What are their needs? Not looking at the project through the eyes of the audience is probably the biggest mistake many people starting a website design make. They are simply too focused on their own needs and not that of their audience. For example, suppose your company worked for years to develop a product that you plan to call SuperGen Enhancer. It is a skin cream that makes a woman look younger. You need to realize in developing your website that you are not selling SuperGen Enhancer – you are selling youth and anti-aging. Those are the magic words in your web content that your audience would probably use in searching. The exception here would be the case of marketing a product that is well-branded. In that case the audience is probably familiar with the brand name. For a new product, however, this is unlikely. You may have some luck using the company name, however, if the is well branded. But would people search on that for your product? Potential new customers may not know the brand.
Here are some example questions to ask to define that client:
What is their age range?
What is their gender?
What is their vocabulary?
Educational level?
What is their geographic location?
What is their ethnic background?
What is their economic situation?
Also try to identify any other unifying characteristic such as religion, physical challenges, sports, movies and reading categories. You may wish to do market research to define your target market. In addition, look at competing websites. What do you like and dislike about each?
There is one important question that is not on the above list. And most website designers, unfortunately, don’t understand it. Here is that key question:
What benefit are you offering your audience?
Never forget that question.
Communicating using a website s VERY different from using mass media. With mass media, you are generally targeting a large generic audience. With a television ad, you have maybe 30 seconds or less to do it. On your website you have less than three seconds. Or, to put it another way, you have 3-4 words. You better know what the need (or really the want) of your audience is and target that quickly. This is called niche marketing.
Marketing using mass media is generally done by pushing information to people you feel need to see it. There is some niching going on. Some magazines, for example, use cluster analysis to identify the needs of people in your area and does the ad placement in your magazine based on that. Newspapers do the same thing. Television do a similar type of niching, using ads on those kids programs based on the program content.
With websites and billions of web pages out there in cyberland, the niching is far more intense. Also, instead of pushing your message, you want to be able to pull in those who really should be reading it. In other words, there less response, but those that do respond are more qualified. When a search is made in the search engines against that niche, the list is short and you are near the top. I know one company that has over 80 websites. They have each website niched to a particular market.
Lesson: With a small business, start by targeting one key area of that market and do it well. This qualities your customers before that click into your site. This also keep you at the top of the search engine results for your niche.
