Determine Your Needs
Determining Your Audience | Your Content | What About Technology?
There are a number of factors you need to consider when developing an effective website.
What are your goals for the site? What do you think the site will accomplish? How will you know if you've succeeded?
Determine your needs rather than your wants. Your budget and your intended audience will also determine some of the parameters.
There are several important aspects to the design process as we work together:
- Determine your site's purpose and how you will evaluate success.
- Ensure a distinctive look and functional design that accomplishes your site's purpose.
- Design a site that is compatible with your other promotional materials (perhaps those materials need updating).
- Develop a plan that meets your goals, identifies who is authorized to sign-off on the design (as well as requested changes to that design), includes a testing and launch strategy and incorporates site maintenance and future updates.
- Evaluate where there are in-house expertise and where we'll need to employ outside professional help.
What's Your Message?
The content and design of your site is determined by the sort of message you want to convey as well as what your visitors may be seeking when they land on your site.
- Many modern sites use large images to tell the story but that doesn't work for information-intensive sites.
- Video is powerful but it needs to be appropriate to your site's purpose and not everyone will watch video.
- The age and technical acuity of your anticipated audience can help you determine the content and technologies you employ.
- The careful use of key words and key phrases needs to be assessed.
There is no point drawing visitors to your site if you cannot satisfy the search queries that drew them there in the first place (something that can cost you in terms of your visibility on Google searches).
Your content needs to enhance your other advertising and branding but should take advantage of the benefits the Web has to offer, including technology that your audience finds compelling.
Starting the Discussion
We'll want to be more general at the start of discussions to determine the overall project scope. Be sure to include your current and future plans.
As the discussion proceeds, we'll move more into specifics and how we can best accomplish your goals within your budget.
Once we have fixed the overall plan, we need to decide upon some specifics.
Sharing Each Other's Expertise
You probably know more about your business or organization than I do, but getting the right message across will depend upon how well you can communicate your requirements in the language of the Internet.
I'll do my best to communicate the technical considerations in plain language.
Key Elements
What is that the impression you want your site visitors to have?
There are a number of key elements that we'll need to address, including:
- Who is your target audience? What are their needs? Is it multi-generational? How well do they use technology?
- What is your message? Is it static or dynamic? How easy is it to explain?
- Who is your competition? What advantages or disadvantages do you have?
- Are there sales, subscriptions or memberships?
- How often does content change? What causes it to change?
- What is your budget? Does it include allocations for site updates and changes?
- Are you already engaged in social media like Facebook and Twitter?
- Do you have a blog? Do you need one?
- Do you or your staff have the time and inclination to commit to maintaining a blog or social media?
- What results do you anticipate the new or updated website will produce?
- How will you measure success?
Answers to these questions will in turn determine factors like:
- site structure and layout (including navigation);
- the need for e-commerce elements;
- whether a blog or social media makes sense for you;
- the site content, interactivity, & technologies employed; and
- how the site content will be managed in the future.
We need to be realistic about your goals, capabilities and expectations. Not all factors are in your control, but we can focus on those that are more concrete.
Be sure to voice any constraints up front such as budget limitations, timelines, personnel capabilities or anything else that could sidetrack the project. We want to provide the best experience possible for your company, your staff and yourself.
Who is Your Audience?
The more we know about your target audience, the more certain we can be about our choices.
Visitor Demographics
Demographics will determine what elements are necessary for the success of your project. The more you know about your user demographics the easier it is to select options that will translate into success.
- Are you serving a known user base like the members of a club, association or organization?
- Are they younger, older or a combination?
- Is age or gender relevant? Are there cultural considerations?
- Do you have special needs for accessibility?
Identifying your target audience will help to determine what sort of web presence you need and the sort of technology the site needs to employ.
Video is Compelling
Traditionally, most sites have been compositions of text and graphics (images) but video is a powerful way to present your product or story.
If you or your employees are very effective with people, a video showcasing your staff serving customers or speaking about how they resolved customer issues can make the experience more personal for site visitors.
YouTube
YouTube and similar sites provide an economic way to upload and convert video into a usable format. YouTube can be linked to or embedded into your site and you can have a YouTube account where all your videos are listed in one location.
That said, modern web technologies make it much easier to embed video that previously.
Infographics
Infographics can provide your visitors with a new way to view information about your product or service then share it with friends and contacts.
An example is this infographic (only a portion is shown):
Notice how colour and the bold use of text and images can communicate a lot in a small space and is more compelling than text alone.
Meet an Emotional Need
Infographics require some thought and work best when they satisfy an emotional need as well as a technical one.
Infographics are created by graphic artists.
Your Content
We need an inventory of any content you currently have and what we may need to generate to make the site work as intended. This includes site logos, photos, drawings, PDFs and similar content.
Is it Yours?
You need to confirm in writing that you have the legal right to use the content you provide.
Legal teams search the Web looking for infractions. The costs of including content illegally on your project can be very expensive.
See Copyright: Who owns the content?
Outside Resources
I maintain relationships with professionals in various areas of expertise including graphic artists, photographers, etc.
Gather Your Materials
It is important that you provide all the proprietary text, images and video content before work can begin on the site.
I cannot commit to a timeline without having these materials in my possession in a suitable format that I can work with.