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What are the considerations when planning your site?

When planning your website, there are many considerations you must make before you can embark on what can be a very considerable project. It’s not as simple as saying:

 

“I want a website, please make me something that looks nice and makes me lots of money”.

You must first consider what you want to achieve with the site, how are you going to achieve this who is going to access your site, why they are going to want to visit you and many other factors. We have compiled our top five considerations you must address when planning your site:

 

What are the primary goals of your site?

This is the most important question you must answer. What do you want to achieve from the site you are about to build? This is slightly different from what you want the site to do. If you know what you want to achieve then you can start to build a site that is based around these goals. For example your goals may be one of the following:

• Make it easier for customers to purchase from you
• Have more potential customers calling your office
• Sell more goods
• Gather contact details for marketing
• Generate more sales leads

Whatever you objectives, it is important to recognise these when planning your site.

Who are your target audience?

Normally the answer to this is “everybody”, but on deeper investigation, it is usually possible to define you target audience in one way or another. This is important because it will help us to build the site with their requirements and capabilities in mind. For example your target audience may include:

Elderly – Meaning your site should be easy to use and easy to read
• City slickers – Generally have fast connections and big screens, meaning that your site can be media rich and larger file sizes (although we wouldn’t encourage this in most cases!)
• Country dwellers – Less likely to have a fast internet connection so the website must be fast to download and maybe have a text only version.

When do you need the site to be built?

Do you have a trade show coming up that you would like the website ready for? Do you want it ready in weeks or months? Some websites can take many months and so it is important to be realistic about how long it is going to take. Perhaps a phased approach would suit you better?

What features would you like on your site?

More importantly, how are these features going to help you achieve your objectives set out earlier? It may be nice to have that great looking piece of flash or an interactive map, but how is it going to benefit your users? Will it help them in any way? Is it worth the extra cost?

What is your budget?

This tends to be the most difficult question to answer but it is important to know this so that you can be realistic with what you can afford. In 99% of cases what you want and what you can get for the money available are normally very different. It is important to have an idea of your budget in order to ensure that what we quote for you is realistic. See our guide on how much a website is likely to cost so you can get some idea of what you can expect it to cost.

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