Difficult and Important Website Questions
Here is a list recently blogged by Seth Godin. Spend time on these questions before you spend money on your site:
- What is the goal of the site?
- In other words, when it's working great, what specific outcomes will occur?
- Who are we trying to please?
- If it's the boss, what does she want?
- Is impressing a certain kind of person important?
- Which kind?
- How many people on your team have to be involved?
- At what level?
- Who are we trying to reach?
- Is it everyone? Our customers? A certain kind of prospect?
- What are the sites that this group has demonstrated they enjoy interacting with?
- 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?
- Do we need people to spread the word using various social media tools?
- Are we building a tribe of people who will use the site to connect with each other?
- Do people find the site via word of mouth?
- Are they looking to answer a specific question?
- Is there ongoing news and updates that need to be presented to people?
- Is the site part of a larger suite of places online where people can find out about us, or is this our one sign post?
- Is that information high in bandwidth or just little bits of data?
- Do we want people to call us?
- How many times a month would we like people to come by? For how long?
- Who needs to update this site? How often?
- How often can we afford to overhaul this site?
- Does showing up in the search engines matter? If so, for what terms? At what cost?
- Will we be willing to compromise any of the things above in order to achieve this goal?
- Will the site need to be universally accessible? Do issues of disability or language or browser come into it?
- How much money do we have to spend? How much time?
- And finally, do you understand that ‘everything’ is not an option?
And these…
- Who are the 2 or 3 people you’d want to be sure to talk to – to help think through the issues, help you figure out who should do the work, etc.?
- In addition to Apple’s site, are there 2 or 3 that you think are really appealing and work well for business and in particular, your type of business?
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Seth Godin: Building A Website That Works
Download a copy of Knock, Knock - Seth Godin's guide to building a website that works. You can get a copy from the Seth Godin page now.
