Planning A Website – Questions To Ask

Today Seth Godin wrote a post called “Things to ask before you redo your website” in which he lists a number of questions you should ask yourself as you look to redesign (or design anew) your website. He covers many of the same ideas that we cover all the time as you look to create a web strategy.

Seth starts out with the big one: What is the goal of the site?

If you read this blog you have seen this recommendation a dozen times. If you don’t have goals for your website – than what is the point? Every website should have a goal. What kind of goals? Check out our 5 Web Strategy goals post to get started. Seth goes on with his own suggestions for goals:

• Are we trying to close sales?
• Are we telling a story?
• Are we earning permission to follow up?
• Are we hoping that people will watch or learn?

Can you answer any of those questions? If not – you need a web strategy plan.

Check out Seth’s post for a great list of questions you should ask yourself as you are planning a web strategy.

[image via flickr]

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5 Web Strategy Goals

Any good web strategy has to have goals so you can analyze and measure progress. Without goals it is much harder to know if your strategies and techniques are working. Goals are equivalent to conversions – meaning getting your website visitors to take a specific action.

The number of conversions you make per website visitor is known as your “conversion rate” – and can easily be tracked in any web analytics service. See “How To Measure Goals in Google Analytics” for more information on setting these up.

Now that you know what conversions and goals are – here are five examples of goals you should have for your website. You can use a combination of goals – ie: sales and subscribers – which can also be tracked in analytics. Having and measuring goals can make analyzing and tweaking your website exponentially easier allowing you to use data to make decisions (which is what we do for clients at 48Web).

5 Web Strategy Goals

1. Make a Sale
Our first and most obvious goal for a website is to make a sale. After all – we are all about making money in business and if you can generate sales through your website – your potential is exponential.

2. Get Permission
Getting permission from a website visitor to opt-in to your marketing channel gets you one step closer to making a sale and is just as important as the sale itself. Having permission from a user – regardless of making the sale – gives you future opportunities to increase your future conversion rates and helps you reach the other web strategy goals you have in place. We’ll dive into more examples of getting – and acting on – permission in future posts.

3. Get Them To Subscribe
Having a visitor to your website subscribe to your content – whether it be blog, podcast, video, FriendFeed, etc – gives you an excellent opportunity at becoming a value-add resource for potential clients, leads, and sales. A content subscriber generally flows into other conversion funnels after trust has been established.

4. Build Community
Building and involving yourself in online communities helps you get one step closer to your other web strategy goals. Promoting community on your website is a key way in building that network. Strong community involvement is also often a path to your other conversion goals but by itself is powerful nonetheless. Strong community – whether it is on Twitter, FriendFeed, or Facebook can help generate organic traffic and help you build trust within your network. “Word Of Mouth” Traffic + Trust= high conversion rates.

5. Interaction and Engagement
Comments, sharing, referrals, word of mouth, etc are all amazing ways to increase your other conversion goals because this kind of crowd-sourced feedback helps you optimize and shape your online strategy. If you’ve built a strong community this level of engagement can have powerful results – again leading into your most important conversion funnels – permission and sales.

What other goals do you have in your web strategy? Did we miss something? Have something to add to one of our points? Let us know in the comments.

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How To Measure Goals in Google Analytics

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You Make What You Measure

The title of this post comes from Paul Graham’s recent post “Startups In 13 Sentences” – his advice to starting a new business.

We come across this question all the time – “What’s the ROI of ____?”. Insert social media, internet marketing, web strategy, etc, etc – everything that we teach. The first thing I tell all my clients and have tried to relay to you on this blog is: Define goals so you have something to measure.

If you can’t chart your progress from the beginning to your current milestone than you cannot measure ROI. And if you don’t have goals the data can be meaningless. Here’s what Paul says…

“Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it. If you want to make your user numbers go up, put a big piece of paper on your wall and every day plot the number of users. You’ll be delighted when it goes up and disappointed when it goes down. Pretty soon you’ll start noticing what makes the number go up, and you’ll start to do more of that. Corollary: be careful what you measure.” via Paul Graham