Setting Goals for your Website

• Home
• Articles
• Setting Goals for your Website

When creating a new website, settings goals should be one of the first things you do on your list. Not knowing where you website is heading from the beginning is looking for disaster. You need to have a clear and concise set of steps that will eventually lead you to your goal.

Choosing Your Target Audience
Your target audience is are the most important people regarding your website. They are the ones who are going to view it, use your websites services, make purchases, or generate income by clicking on ads on your website. Creating a very detailed character map of your idea audience, allows you to cater for your target audience from the beginning, and the more likely your site will succeed. Some questions to ask about your target audience are:

• What is the average age group you are catering? Net savvy teenagers or the older generation.


• What is main gender? Ttip toeing around stereotypes, this can dictate where you should be spending most of your time.


• What region of the world is your target audience in?


• How much time do they spend online?


• What sports or special interests they may have?

Anything that can narrow down your target audience that will best deliver results. This character map is the foundation of the type of content, product and services you will be offering your viewers.
Organizing the Sites Structure

Thinking in the long term is always one of the main factors in success. Like with any project if you don’t build the proper foundation, nothing else is going to succeed. Your websites structure has to be planned before hand. Unplanned for services, products or features can lead to a lot of overhead down the line. And this carries on perpetually, and creates a mess which is much harder to maintain as it wasn’t planned for originally. Make sure everything is planned for, from where you will store your media files, your url structure and to the smallest things like your CSS naming conventions

Design the Look and Feel
This is the more fun part, designing the look and feel can go in any directions. Based on your character map you should have a good idea of the direction you want to take. If you website has a solid foundation and structure, changes you make to your design should have a very big negative impact.

Once you have designed the look and feel, test it on someone completely new to the project. Ideally, someone from your target audience. From briefly looking at it, do they know how the structure of the website is laid out, can they make sense of the navigation? This is vital, as there cannot be any hurdles in trying to decipher what you are offering your target audience.

Putting it all together
After following all the steps closely, you should have a very well tuned website that should start converting very nicely. It however doesn’t end here unfortunately. The web is ever evolving, and you have to make sure your site is updated and maintained regularly. Don’t let it fall into a rut of stagnant content which automatically makes people click back.