Setting Objectives for Website Development
May 23rd, 2007 Edit
Often I encounter a potential client who wants a website or a new website and has nothing but “gadgets” in mind. What I mean is that he is so focused on the bells and whistles that he has neglected to set his site goals. To develop a website you must first determine what it is you want the website to do for you. I know, everyone says, “to increase sales.” But there are specific objectives that have to be met to achieve that overall goal. Let’s review the steps.
STEP ONE: we actually want to work backwards in planning our website by setting the objective(s) of the website first. If there is more than one objective, they should be prioritized.
STEP TWO: With the objectives in mind, we next want to develop a “call-to-action” for each objective. A call-to-action is just a statement that let’s the site visitor know what you want them to do. Some examples are, “contact us for a custom quote” or “reserve your seat now.” You get the idea. They are specific tasks that will, in the long run, contribute to the ultimate goal of “increasing sales.”
STEP THREE: Now, that we have our call-to-actions defined, we need to step back once again and define the benefits that would prompt the visitor to perform the call-to-action. These benefits can be lengthy or short depending on the complexity of the product or service available. Here is a sample of a short benefit with the call-to-action:
“Start moving your career up the corporate ladder, enroll in our management training seminar today.”
Some products or services may require a longer list of benefits, but in any case the list should either end or begin with the call-to-action.
FINAL STEP: So, we’ve started with where we want to be and have stepped back to define the task we want visitors to do for us to achieve our goal and cited the benefits of why they should do so. Is that all? Nope, we still have to backup our products and services with pertinent data. For some reason, site owners don’t seem to have any problem with this part of the project. They quickly turn in brochures or spec sheets for us to create the site. This information is necessary and basic, but it is the BEGINNING of the process and it is from here that we have to drive the visitor to become a customer.
Now we can look at all the bells and whistles that the site owner “likes” and determine how we might best utilize them to close the deal. These bells and whistles have to serve a purpose - hopefully to coax the visitor to buy or they are just eye-candy and taking up valuable space. There’s no doubt that multi-media presentations designed to convey a message or demonstrate a product is a valuable tool and it’s a tool not available in any other advertising medium except the Internet. Interactivity draws the visitor into the site, but in the end the goal must be for the visitor to buy or at least to tell others about the interactive media and ignite a virul marketing campaign.
A virul marketing campaign is a grass-roots campaign where one visitor tells another person about the site and how much he enjoyed something at the site. This prompts the other person to check it out and, if he agrees, he may pass along the same information. This can draw tremendous traffic to a website, but the traffic is useless if it’s not directed at the right audience. Here’s a silly example: you put a picture of a nearly nude Brittany Spears at your industrial hand tool site. A Brittany Spears fan stumbles across your site and sends out the word to all the other Brittany Spears fans. Are Brittany Spears fans the target audience for your industrial hand tools? I doubt it. So, now you have tons of traffic coming to your site but your sales figures hasn’t changed.
DON’T FORGET THE SEARCH ENGINES: Keeping your eye on the ultimate objective while developing your site will bring you the desired results. Developing a site that’s just “pretty” and does “neat” things, won’t improve your bottom line. And, don’t forget the search engines. A search engine must be able to index a website in order to rank it and have it come up on relevant terms. Some design architectures inadvertantly block search engine indexing. When hiring a designer, make sure that they are familiar with search engine optimization techniques. These are not “tricks” or black-hat ideas that will hurt your site, but an understanding of how search engines index so that your site will be indexed properly.
Entry Filed under: Website Design