Website planning is a methodical process that takes your objectives for your website, develops them into strategies and then creates a blueprint for building your website.
Start by asking the question why are you building this website? What is the website’s purpose? What should this website achieve if it is going to be successful? What is the business reason for creating the website? Your business goals and your website goals should be aligned.
Here are 10 typical business objectives that you may want from your website:
- Generate sales leads
- Sell products online
- Build trust and credibility
- Position your company or brand as a market leader
- Inform about your products and services
- Provide customer service such as order status, tracking, order history, submit requests.
- Collect information from surveys and forms.
- Build an email list for re-marketing
- Introduce your staff that customers will deal with.
- Provide contact information /maps for locations
Start website planning by prioritizing your goals starting with the overriding primary goal. Then start listing the secondary goals. This prioritizing allows you to develop call to actions, messaging, images and content that supports these goals. You can develop selling sequences and visually prioritize the most important objectives into the layout.
If you do not prioritize then there will be too many options and potential paths for visitors to take. Too many options create confusion and therefore no visitor action. A successful websites guides website visitors to taking action without too many decisions. Too many choices or options lead visitors to making no choice at all and they will simply leave.
How do you measure success of the project? You should set measurable key performance indicators that will allow you to measure success, improvements or failures. Use these as indicators to continue to make changes and improvements.