Set out your goals
This is the most important step in planning your website. You cannot
possibly create a successful website, if you have no goals, and the
wrong goals will result in failure. You can look at this step as a kind
of mission statement. Consider the following example of a set of goals.
- The site will become the definitive resource for search engine
optimisation and internet marketing information in South Africa
- The site will offer free, useful and relevant content to it's
visitors
- The content will be keyword rich
- The content will be organised so that users may easily find the
particular information they are looking for
- Users will be anyone who owns or controls a website, and wants
it to succeed in its goals, usually financial, or other
professionals in this field.
- The site will establish the company's credentials as experienced
experts in their field, and thereby attract new clients.
- The success of the site will be measured by the number of new
clients achieved
- The site will be search engine optimised, using the latest
techniques
- The site will dominate the search engines for its selected
keywords, initially locally, but ultimately globally.
- …
As you can see, the goals above define the purpose of the site, and
the direction it should take to achieve them, without spelling out how
the goals are to be achieved. This is done in the later sections. Each
of the goals is realistic and achievable, and none are mutually
exclusive – success in one goal doesn't prevent the success in any of
the others. The example above lists very general goals for simplicity,
but the more specific your goals, the more accurate the rest of your
planning can be, and the easier it will be to measure your success.
There are a few important elements that every set of goals should have:
Target Audience
You need to know who your target audience is. All the content of your
site will be written to these people, so you should be aware of who you
are writing to. Simply writing your content to "anyone who reads it" is
not going to get the best out of your writing. It is generally not a
good idea to have more than one group of target users – if you find
yourself in this position, you should consider creating a new website
for each group, or specifically defining which parts of the site are
targeted towards each group. Each section of the site, at least, should
be targeted to only one type of user, so that any single visitor can be
sure that, if one article is relevant to them, all the other articles in
the section will be too. Your users shouldn't be forced to filter
through your articles to find something relevant to their needs – you
should do that filtering for them.
Measure of Success
Defining how you measure the success of your site is vitally
important. It tells you not only whether your website is a success or
not, but it allows you to measure the effectiveness of any changes you
make to your site. Remember that the initial plan you lay out will
change often over time, as you develop the site, and move closer towards
achieving your goals. You need to be able to decide what is working in
your content, structure and look-and-feel, and what is not. The only way
to make this decision is with an objective measure of success.
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