Twenty Questions to Answer Before Designing a Web Site

There are twenty basic questions you'll want to answer before proceeding. Taking the time to carefully answer these questions now will help you avoid wasting your time and energy creating a purposeless Web site that neither supports your firm's goals nor your customers' and prospects' needs later.

Purpose

Form follows function. The content and design of your Web site should reflect both why you are creating it and why people are visiting it. Answering these questions, will help you focus on the message rather than the medium. Accordingly, start by focusing on the results you want to achieve from your Web site.

1. What is the primary purpose of your Web site?

Why are you creating a Web site? What kind of results are you looking for? Are you looking for immediate response or paving the way for a more aggressive Web presence in the future? Is your goal to sell a specific product or service, generate floor traffic, communicate with investors and shareholders, or support products that you have already sold? Or are you trying to position your business relative to your competition? Is your goal to reduce customer support costs? If you could communicate only one idea to your Web site visitors, what would it be? How can you substantiate it? What evidence, or information, can you provide?

2. What are some of your other goals?

List some of the other objectives you would like your Web site to achieve in order of importance.

3. What action do you want Web site visitors to take?

Do you want them to request further information, visit your place of business, or purchase directly from your Web site?

4. How are you going to measure the success of your Web site?

Try to establish ways to quantify the success of your Web sites. Successful Web sites are designed to satisfy both results and resources. Success comes to the degree you identify your goals and make a realistic appraisal of the resources you have at your disposal. The alternative is to waste a lot of time and money. There are many Web Analytic tools (Clicktracks, Google Analytics) that can give detailed reports about visitors to the site. This is one way in which Web site performance can be measured.

Content

You are only one-half of the equation. Your Web site visitors are the other half. Successful Web sites are outer-directed. They are built around the needs of their visitors rather than the egos and enthusiasms of the Web site creators. Remember: you're not creating a Web site for yourself; you're creating it to satisfy your visitors' needs. Success will come to the degree that you identify your Web site visitors and their needs and then create a Web site that satisfies their needs.

5. Whom do you want to visit your Web site?

The design and type of information you include in your Web site should reflect the expectations of your customers, and this involves knowing who they are. Are you interested in attracting first-time buyers, repeat buyers, or step-up buyers looking for improved performance?

6. What types of information are they looking for?

If they are repeat customers, they probably already possess basic buying information and are more likely to be price- or feature-oriented than first-time buyers who are interested in a basic introduction to the field.

7. What types of information can you provide?

Your goal is to avoid marketing myopia -- the feeling that just because you know something, your prospective buyers also know it. Chances are, they don't. Your Web site will succeed to the extent that you expand the market by educating them. From your entire universe of information about your field, your goal is to choose information that your Web site visitors are searching for.

8. How often do you want Web site visitors to return?

The more you want your Web site visitors to return, the more you'll want to frequently update your site.

9. How can you build immediacy into your Web site?

Your market is likely to have a short memory. If visitors don't immediately act, they might never act. What incentives can you offer to encourage your market to immediately respond to your offerings? Are there ways you can make your Web visitors feel special and, hence, more likely to respond immediately?

Information is the core of a successful Web site. Success comes from offering your Web site visitors information that supports your goals.

Design

The design colors, typography, layout, and organization of your Web site should be influenced by the image you want to project (as influenced by the market you want to attract) as well as the content you're going to include.

10. What type of image do you want to project?

Do you want to project an affordable or upscale image? Do you want to project a youthful or a more conservative image?

11. What type of content will be included?

The balance of text and graphics is likely to play a key role in the organization and layout of your Web site. Text-heavy Web sites present an entirely different set of challenges than do Web sites containing numerous images. The type of content you are going to include also influences the production tools and price that will be needed to create your Web site.

12. How much involvement do you want to include?

Are there ways that you can begin to help Web site visitors sell themselves and encourage the sale by helping them prequalify themselves? Tools like financing and lease calculators can save a great deal of your sales staff's time.

13. What do your competitor's Web sites look like?

It's important that your Web site projects a unique and consistent image, one clearly different from your competitors. The last thing in the world you want is for your Web site to be confused with your competitors or worse to sell their products!

Production

Before beginning work, it's appropriate to take an inventory of available resources.

14. What resources are available for creating your Web site?

What printed media, video, photographs, documents, etc. do you have to provide content for your site? Who is going to gather these ingredients for you? Will it be you, your employees, or will you need our services?

15. How much Internet or desktop publishing skills do you, or your staff, possess?

Would you feel comfortable updating your own site? Should you choose having a dynamic website this is an option you have.

The design of your Web site and the level of visitor involvement you choose to allow should reflect your time and budget. If your resources are limited, you start out with a plain and simple Web site, and improve it as your resources improve.

Follow - Up, Promotion, and Maintenance

Web sites do not operate in a vacuum. Their success is based as much on management as on design. The best-looking, most content-filled Web site will not succeed unless it is carefully integrated into your firm's day to day marketing and sales activities. Likewise, Web sites do not succeed on their own.

Web sites succeed to the extent that they attract repeat visitors and recommendations from repeat visitors. At the very least, some highly visible aspect of your Web site should change every month. The goal is not to undermine the consistency and image of your Web site, but simply to highlight new content and provide a fresh reason for visitors to take another look at what you have to offer.

16. Who is going to follow - up on comments, queries, requests for information and sales?

The volume of e-mail, for example, is certain to increase as your Web site becomes more and more successful. Successful Web sites are those that begin relationships with prospective clients and customers by making them participants rather than observers.

17. How are you going to promote your Web site?

To succeed, Web sites need to be promoted. At the very least, your Web site address should be included in every advertisement and on every print communication you prepare including brochures, business cards, flyers, letterheads, newsletters, postcards, and posters. This will ensure that present customers will become familiar with your Web site address. Does it make sense to send a postcard to past and present customers inviting them to visit your Web site?

18. What search terms do you want to use to promote your Web site?

It is important to bring your Web site to the attention of search engines. What information categories should you concentrate on so that search engines can locate your Web site?

19. What Web sites can contain links to your Web site?

What can you offer to motivate others to include a link to your Web site in theirs?

If you are a retailer, can you list your Web site on your vendor's Web sites? If you are a member of an association, can your Web site address be included on their site? Does your local Chamber of Commerce have a Web site containing links to the Web sites of its members?

20. How are you going to keep your Web site fresh?

What can you do to encourage repeat visits? What types of information is likely to change? How often does new information become available? What types of information at your Web site is appropriate for updating: products, procedures, prices or your commentary on the issues of the day?

The simpler the design of your Web site, of course, the easier it will be to maintain it by making relatively minor changes in its content.  Maintenance becomes easy to the extent that your design has been planned to accommodate updating and revision

Putting the Answers to Work

These twenty questions are by no means the only questions you'll be considering in the coming weeks. Additional questions requiring additional answers will come up as we take an increasingly detailed look at developing the content and design of your Web site.

Did you notice that many of the questions are related? For example, the results you want to achieve and the type of visitors you want to attract determines the content and design of your Web site, and the content and design of your Web site, in turn, influence the hardware and software required to create an appropriate Web site.