STEP 2 Web Site Planning and Evaluation
Before you start to design and build a website, it is necessary to think about and decide various factors, evaluating both your needs and those of your visitors.
This brainstorming step can be considered your business plan.
It will be easier if you read all the steps in How To Build Web Sites first, to gain a better understanding of what’s involved.
A website is a creation. Many factors, strategic, technical and visual, go into its design and utility, in order for the site to achieve your objectives. The suggestions below can be used as a starting point, to decide what you want from the site.
Purpose
- What will be its primary purpose? Decide the purpose for entire site, then the purpose for each page.
- Who is your target audience?
- Send possible new clients to see your services etc
- Find clients for your business
- Increase your professionalism
- Marketing your offline business
- Passive Income streams – Google ads, affiliate links
- Sell products, books etc
- Be an authority on your field of expertise
- Teach people about your area of expertise - informational
- Testimonials from happy clients
- Special members’ area
- Capture email addresses, for targeted marketing
- See also Why Have A Website
Theme
Making Money
Customers
- Profile your customers – who are they, what are their needs?
- What languages do they use?
- What facilities do you want to offer them?
- How do they prefer to order and pay you? Online, offline. Will you offer alternative methods of payment? See eCommerce Resources
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Site Facilities
- Newsletter
- Members’ Area
- Interactive site
- Forms for people to fill out – newsletter, registration, members, passwords, feedback
- Shopping cart
- Audio/video
- Search site box
- Forum/discussion boards, or Live Chat
- Secure pages
- Refer To A Friend
- Bookmark Us
- Image Gallery
- Autoresponder
- Printable pages
- eCommerce
- Database of customers for mail-outs
- Guestbook
- How much traffic do you anticipate receiving? How many people online at one time (see Hosting)
- Special scripts that will trigger an action once initiated. For example, a thank you page automatically appears after a user has filled out a form.
- Lots more ideas of what’s available in Web Tools
Pages
- Contact information
- Services and/or Products
- About Us
- Testimonials
- General Information, by topic
- Helpful Links
- Articles
- Newsletter
- Site Map (if complex or has not-readily-accessible pages from the Home page)
- Archived information
- Blog
- Read more about Structure
Competition
Who are your competitors? Can you adapt ideas from them, or can you do it better?
Marketing
- How will your customers find you? Through search engines, internet marketing, pay-per-click advertising, offline advertising.
- Freebie - do you have anything to give away, maybe as an enticement to subscribe
- Read more on Web Site Marketing
Design and Appearance
- What atmosphere do you want it to create? Fun, Professional, Classy, Informal, Down-to-earth, Colourful, Formal, Business-Like etc
- Get a general idea of how you’d like it to look
- Compare other sites. What do you like or dislike about them?
- What tones and colours would you use? Bright, subdued, black and white, loud, soft tones, dark/light contrast, mid tones. Would you prefer a white/light-coloured background or dark background with white/light grey writing?
- Do you already have a brochure, business card or logo that can be used as a basis for colours and appearance of the rest of the site?
- More information on Design
Maintenance
- Who will maintain the site and customer data base? Updates, broken links, new content, marketing.
- How much time can you spend each week on this?
Time Constraints
Do you have time to build a website yourself? Do the marketing, the search engine optimization, find the affiliate programs or products, the maintenance? Or can you outsource some or all of these? See Website Services.
For beginners, the amount of time it will take to make host and market a web site depends on how complex your site will be. Learning how to use the web page builder, gathering content and setting up resources such as affiliates and payment systems, SEO, finding the right web hosting service for you, and then marketing your site can easily take 150 hours or more. Very simple web sites with no SEO, like an online brochure, will take much less time.
Budget
After reading through the rest of this site, you should have an idea of what you need to buy or pay for to achieve your objectives. Lots of resources are available for free, and we have listed many of them. If you are not concerned with achieving a high search engine rank, it is possible to build a free website
Brainstorming
We find it very helpful to get a general, overall idea of how a web site will be, how it will work, what it will do for customers, how it will make money etc, then present it to trusted friends or family (who won’t steal your idea) for brainstorming.
You now have a general idea of what your web site will do and be, it’s time to go into more detail. Everything about a website can be changed, even after it’s published, so you can change your ideas or fine tune them as you go along.
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Step 1 How to Build Web Sites Overview < Go To > Step 3 Search Engine Optimization
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