What do you want your web site to achieve?

It's not really enough anymore to simply want a web site to keep up with the Joneses. If you're going to gain any value from your site you need to decide what your objectives are. The more of that your web designer understands the better your site will be.

Overall objectives

Try writing down a list of all the things you want to achieve, for example:

• Sell my product/service on-line
• Inform potential customers about my products/services
• Provide a community for my existing customers
• Provide contact details and support materials for existing customers
• Provide a directory of my regional offices
• Promote my monthly special offers

Who are your target audience

In addition to these objectives you should think about who's going to be visiting your site and why. Try and list the various types of users that might be visiting and what each type of user might want to do while they're there. Some examples of types of users are:

• Prospective customer - possibly researching products like yours - will expect to see product information and contact details.
• Existing customer - possibly wishing to make contact with you or read product or company news.
• Investors - will want to see financial information, press releases and news about your company.
• Press - will want to see press releases and announcements, contact details, demos and company information.
• Service user - if your customers are regularly in contact with you (to get support, for example) then you may wish to extend your existing contact mechanisms by adding email or on-line chat.
• Database users - if your site is providing an informational resource, maybe a searchable database, then the users will expect to find that data easily from the home page of your site.

Understanding what your visitors are going to expect to see will help you understand what information and services your site should incorpoate. This will also greatly help your web designer to understand the complexity of your requirements.

Presentation Style

Another aspect you should consider while you're describing your potential visitors is the type of person that they are. The age group and background of your typical user will drastically affect the graphics, fonts and colours that your designer will use.

You should note down what elements will contribute to the presentation of the site. These might include company style and some elements of your business processes, for example:

• I want my site to match my company's marketing style guide
• I want my site to appeal to young people's eyes (18-25)
• We want to promote ourselves as an international company
• We want to promote ourselves as a local company
• Our site content will change daily/weekly - we want to be able to update it ourselves
• Our site content will not change much - we want the web designer to implement our suggested changes as and when we need them.

Once you've got some of what you want to achieve and how you want your business presented then it's time to put that in front of your web designer to get their comments. All this information will give the designer a much clearer picture of what you're asking them to produce.

Inevitably your designer will come back to you with a host of questions based on what you've provided. You should expect the designer to be refining your requirements down into a stricter definition of what pages and programs will be required. This will be a two way process and at the end of if you should have a site definition that describes exactly what will be produced and what each party is expected to provide. This is the document from which a formal quote can be produced.

Copyright © 2000 John Arnold (john@otn.co.uk)