Web design strategy

Your website strategy is very important and before you can really focus on your content you need to answer the following questions.

1. Firstly, what is the purpose of your site? Is it a marketing tool, a shopping cart to enable online sales, or both? What are your objectives?

2. Secondly, what are your strengths and weaknesses? if you were in your visitor's "shoes", would you buy from the site and what would make you return?

3. Thirdly, how is your income going to be generated? Will it be from advertising, from site membership fees, from affiliate programs, or from selling your own product? What are your capabilities and how will you use them to maintain a competitive advantage over your rivals?

The answers to the above will determine your website content and this in turn will determine other aspects of your web site design.

The purpose of your website

Most sites are either informational or e-commerce sites.

Informational sites usually make their income from membership fees, advertising, commissions, or selling at the back end.

E-commerce sites usually make their income by selling a product or service.

It is often difficult to combine both into the same website because an informational site needs to provide unbiased information about the topic of the website, while an e-commerce site needs to generate sales and use direct marketing tactics.

The main objective of informational sites therefore needs to be to maximize your site membership, or your subscriber list. Site usage could be regarded as the internet's equivalent of intangible assets.

The more information the site gathers about its subscribers, the more valuable the list is because it allows marketing to be targeted at specific groups of people, defined by where they live, how much they earn, whether they are male or female, etc… However it is also VERY important that any subscriber list is entirely opt-in because they want information from you.

Your objectives must also be feasible and suitable for the industry you are focusing on.

In your visitor's shoes

Always put yourself in your web site visitor's "shoes". If you were the website visitor, what would keep you on the site. What makes your site sticky?

By doing this you can easily identify your strengths and weaknesses!

The more focused your site it, the more likely you are to satisfy your visitors requirements, and the more likely they are to return and use your site in future.

The layout and navigation of your web pages are going to affect the usability of your site. It is very important to get these right and to know which web technologies to use. We look at these in great detail in the sections about Layout strategy and Navigation strategy.

Even more important is your Content strategy because you need to provide content that is likely to be targeted at your visitors. Are you providing the content your visitors are looking for?

How your website income is generated

Informational sites usually generate their revenue from membership fees, advertising, commissions from affiliate programs and making sales to their members or subscribers using off-the-web marketing, for example through a newsletter or direct mail. Selling is the secondary objective.

The main objective of an e-commerce site is to promote an effective marketing message and to make the buying process as easy as possible. Creating a marketing base is the secondary objective. They usually have two types of customers, transactional and relational.

The purchase decisions of transactional customers are influenced by short-term reasons such as price, convenience, and/or availability.

Relational customers have built up a relationship with the business usually through previous contact. Their purchase decisions are based more on the customer relationship that has been built up, quality of support, and knowledge of the product or service or brand.

You need to identify where your market is and what your capabilities are. You need to identify what gives you a competitive advantage over your rivals.

You need to generate as much qualified traffic as possible, and turn the traffic into qualified leads, and then turn leads into your customers.

  Your Website Content