Avoid Web Site Planning Traps

Whether you are building a new site or updating an existing one, keeping a few important ideas in mind can help you save time and money.

KNOW YOUR SITE'S BUSINESS RATIONALE
A web site can attract new customers, reduce marketing expenses, deliver information faster, cut down on support costs, or create new revenue streams. What are the specific business goals you want your web site to help you achieve? Write these goals down.

No one knows your business as well as you do, so it’s not a good idea to hand over responsibility for the goals and direction of your site to your web design company. They will most likely have good ideas and suggestions, but you should lead this part of the process.

Keep your goals in mind as you build your web site, and never lose sight of the fact that at the end of the day your web site has to either make money or save money in order to be an effective business tool.

EVALUATE YOUR COMPETITION
Identify the web site addresses of the top 5 to 10 companies that are your most significant competitors. They may be local; they may be national or even international. It all depends on your business and your market.

Visit their web sites and make note of how each company presents itself on the web. Is the approach low-key or garish? Is it easy or difficult to navigate? Does it focus on branding at the expense of usability? Do pages load quickly? If you were a customer, would it be easy to find what you're after? No matter how big and powerful your competition may be, almost nobody gets everything right. Often you can learn from their mistakes as much as from their successes.

DEVOTE SUFFICIENT INTERNAL RESOURCES
A successful web site requires effort on the part of the organization paying for it. A skilled web development team can advise and guide the development of your site, but content needs to come from you. Even if your web designer will be writing the content for you, they will still need you to provide the basic information or to be available to “interview.”

Often, the biggest bottleneck to site launch is not design or coding, but creation of content for the site.

• Consider getting a team together specifically for this purpose
• Appoint ONE person to liaise between the team and the developer

• Any images - logos, photos, maps - that you want on the site
• An idea of what the main pages or sections of your site should be
• What keywords you would expect people to type into the search engines to find sites such as yours. Make a list of these.
• Any materials for the site which are not currently in electronic form: try to get them into word processor or spreadsheet format. Web site designers make expensive typists!
• If you are having a response form on your site - and you should - what information would you like to collect from your visitors, in addition to name, email address and comments?

After the site launches you'll have to manage ongoing content development (a stale, out of date web site is worse for your company’s image than no web site at all) and possible growth and expansion of the site. While you may not think it important to plan for these eventualities, even a small, relatively unchanging site requires some care and feeding.

SATISFY YOUR AUDIENCE
No web site or web application is effective unless it satisfies visitors. When building the site, put yourself in the shoes of potential visitors and ask yourself what information they are likely to be looking for and questions they are likely to have.

Once your site is launched, ongoing customer feedback is an important tool that will help you make your site even better. Get in the habit of asking your clients if they visit your web site and what they like and don’t like about it.

Customer feedback will also help you settle disputes within your company about what is working on the site and what is not.

CONTINUE TO IMPROVE
As your site matures, be sure to track the site's performance relative to your initial goals. Pay attention to customer feedback. Stick to these fundamentals and managing your site will be easier and more productive.