How to Refine Your Website Goals and Objectives
Make short and long-term goals for your website and provide this information to your web designer. With this information, they can work towards helping you achieve your goals in the most efficient way. When your web designer understands where things are headed, they will be able to come up with a design and structure that will accommodate your future requirements better. For example, if you plan to add more items to your menu at a later stage, the web designer can keep this in mind and create a menu structure that can be added to.
You must have a strategy for creating and setting up your website, so you will maximise its potential. Outlining everything you need to do regarding your website will enable you to create an outline of what needs to be accomplished.
Establish what you want to achieve with your website. Be clear on how you want your customers and prospects to interact with your website. Carefully consider how each element of your website will be used to produce an objective. Your goals will usually include some of the following:
- Generating new sales or leads.
- Establish a connection with your target audience.
- Growing an opt-in subscription list.
- Improve communications with your customers and prospects.
While the short-term goal for your website may simply be to get an online presence, you should consider your long-term goals and objectives. What you create initially should be useful for the long term, so you won’t need to start again from scratch. This will save you time and money in the long run.
Maybe your long-term goal is to introduce new products or services for sale online. If this is your intention, you should have a website where your programmer can easily introduce ecommerce features.
Make sure your home page is uncluttered with unimportant things and focused on your primary objective. From the outset, you should know what your website’s primary objective is and focus on achieving that while allowing for expandability and future growth. Make it easy for your visitors to find exactly what they are looking for quickly. You have less than four seconds, on average, to get the attention of your visitors. While animated intro’s or splash pages might impress them initially, it’s more likely to frustrate your audience and be more of a hindrance than a help.
Strategic Planning
You should outline in your brief how you want your website to complement your offline marketing strategy. Maybe some of your marketing goals can be met through your website that you did not consider. For example, a user feedback form may facilitate a business objective you have been working towards. Maybe your ability to respond to customer requests or problems could also be enhanced via your website. Maybe you could also use your website as a research tool to analyse what people are most interested in. If your web developer understands where you are headed, they may be able to come up with an online strategy that will help meet your goals or enhance your results as a business.
Achievable and Realistic
You should be very open in dealing with your web designer. While you have a great deal of knowledge about your business, you should presume your web designer knows nothing about your business or industry. Provide them with as much information as possible. For example, if you have a very limited budget, tell them up front. They may have a solution by using a completely different approach than what they would have presented to someone with a higher budget.
Total honesty and transparency will allow your web developer to come up with the most appropriate solution for your situation. Maybe they can cut down your web development process into smaller stages to accommodate your requirements. After all, your website should provide a return on investment that can be reinvested into future web development.
Take Time to Review Your Ideas
As soon as you have expressed everything you want your web designer to understand in a brief, make it clear you are open to recommendations and suggestions. It’s important to stay flexible, particularly with the rapidly changing world of the Internet. Your web developer should be in touch with the latest trends and capabilities that you may not be aware of. Arrange a meeting with your web designer, so you can go over the brief and further develop your plan together. This will give you the chance to make things clear and make sure you are both on the same page. Through this meeting, your designer may also need to ask you questions and brainstorm some ideas with you. Working as a team is vital in coming up with the best design that will launch a successful website. Through this process, your brief will evolve into a fully-blown, ultimate web strategy.
