Website planning
Whether you intend to construct it yourself or hire someone to create it for you, the first step in developing a successful website or blog is planning. Here are some questions you should answer at the beginning:
• For whom are you creating the website? (e.g. retail customers, distributors, clients, etc.)
• What is the purpose of the website? Do you want to make an acquisition via the website and obtain, for example, names, addresses and telephone numbers for clients? Will you sell products or services directly from the web? Do you need to place products for download here?
• What features (sorting, database, audio, video, etc.) will you need on the web?
If you sell products online directly, you will want the shopping cart to have the option of cross-selling, for example (to encourage people to add additional goods to their orders, even at a higher price).
• How many different types of items will you offer on your site if it is an online store?
• Do you need to connect a payment gateway to the website?
• Will the items you sell be in different sizes and colours?
• How will you coordinate web sales with inventory and order fulfilment?
• How often do you want to update content or products on the web?
• Who will update? Do you want to do it yourself or have one of your employees attend to it?
• Will you need a web developer to customise or write code to make the site work?
• Will the company that creates the site have to design and set up pages on the site? Or will you be able to choose a ready-made template (such as a Wordpress template) for your design?
• Do you have an existing logo that needs to be incorporated into website design? If so, do you have original graphics you can provide to web developers?
• If you don't have a logo, who will create it?
• Do you have a colour preference or a certain style of graphics for the site?
• What types of websites do you find attractive? (Make a list of URLs of websites you've visited and like, and write down why you're interested.)
• Do you want to be able to get contacts to visitors through the page and then send them newsletters and various offers by email?
• Who writes the web content?
• Do you have a person at your disposal who will continuously supplement the texts and content of the website? Or will you do it yourself?
• What graphics (photos or drawings) will need to be on the site?
• Where will you get graphics from?
• Who will perform search engine optimisation (SEO)?
• Can you give the person who will be working with SEO a list of keywords and phrases that your customers are likely to search for to find your product or service on the web?
• How do you market a site and attract visitors to that site?
• Who will do the marketing?
• What will it cost you to promote the site and its content, and what channels do you want to use?
• How will you measure the success of your site?
• How much money do you plan for development and updating your website?
• By what date do you want the site to be completed and published?
The second part of the series will look at the technical aspects of setting up a website.
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