Planning Your Website
The internet has changed rapidly over the past couple of years and, despite the failure of many prominent ventures, it has established itself as an important business tool.
Hard lessons have been learned, the most important of which is that sound planning is just as important for a website as it is for any other aspect of business.
Your Business on the Web
These days, anyone can have a website. But for your e-business or e-commerce site to be successful you need to decide exactly what you want the site to achieve and how it will integrate with the rest of your operation:
- How will your website fit in with your business plan?
- Have you set clear measurable goals for the site?
- What is your marketing strategy?
- How will you support customers who use the site?
- Will you need new staff and resources?
- Will you be able to update the site regularly and respond to changes in demand?
These are the questions you need to consider before looking into the design and implementation of your site. There are many resources to help you, some of which are listed in our Useful Links section
Your Customers
With a huge potential audience on the web, it may be tempting to try to appeal to as many people as possible. But web users have proven to be extremely fickle. If a site does not appeal to them directly or offer what they are looking for they will move on to another. So it pays to research your target audience:
- Who do you want to visit your site?
- How will they find out about it?
- What will attract them to the site?
- What will they do while they're there?
- What will keep them coming back?
You may already have conducted research into your customer base, or you may be able to find research conducted by other companies. In any case, gather as much information on your target audience as you can, and focus you efforts on their needs and expectations.
Implementation
Once you get to the design and implementation stage, there is a whole new series of questions to answer. How will you handle:
- site design and structure, including the "look and feel" and information architecture?
- hosting arrangements, back-end databases and programming?
- maintaining the site, content management and changes to the structure and design of the site?
Once again, there are a large number to resources to help you. This is also where we come in - we are able to advise on all aspects of website design and implementation. Contact us for a free consultation.