Marketing

First identify what it must do. You need to establish a clear definition and vision of website success:

• Vision – What will a successful website do for your organization?
• Target Audience – Define who your website needs to attract and support. Good websites anticipate who will be visiting, and proactively plan for them.
• Values – What are the values of your organization and how can you best communicate them?
• Value Proposition – What can your organization do for a website visitor and why is it of value?
• Accountability – How will you know if your website is a success?

Design

While everyone wants an attractive website, good design is about much more than professional attractiveness. It’s about interaction. You want the visitors to become users, to take action.

To accomplish this, the overall website design must establish a strong personal connection between your organization and the visitor. Good design starts with strong navigation and information architecture.

Information Architecture

The information architecture of your site should anticipate and plan for what visitors will want to do. Your website should be intentionally architected to:

• Direct visitors to the information they seek
• Persuade visitors the value of your products
• Funnel visitors to various lead capture mechanisms
• Convert visitors into leads

Website visitors are task oriented. They typically have a specific goal in mind when they come to your website. Your website should provide a decision path for the visitor that enables him/her to succeed. With each question asked and answered, the website visitor will gain confidence, secure in the knowledge that he/she will be able to complete the task at hand.

Content

People visit websites to obtain content, either in the form of information or services. To keep people interested, your content must be:

• Relevant – Don’t simply your story from your perspective. Create content that satisfies your users.
• Fresh – The Web is a dynamic and interactive environment. Users expect up-to-date content.
• Well-structured – The content must be organized so that visitors can easily find what they are looking for.

Content Management

To help you ensure that your content stays valuable for your users, you need a good content management system (CMS) that will readily allow non-technical users to maintain your content.

Technology

Underneath it all, the technology supporting your website should be:

• Open – Your website should be able to communicate with other systems and databases.
• Robust – Your website needs to be reliable and responsive.
• Flexible – As your organization changes, you need a technical platform that can easily adapt to the upcoming changes.
• Scalable – You need a website that can grow with you, both in terms of new directions and increased volumes.
• Standardized – You want to your website to follow industry standards so that it can be easily supported, maintained and changed.

Accountability

One of the greatest assets of a website is that it can be readily measured. You need to define metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will serve your organization. Then you can use web metrics tools, such as Google Analytics, to provide you with relevant reports.