stating your goals

Once you've determined the general direction of your site or its redesign it's important to articulate what you expect from it. What, exactly, are you hoping your site will accomplish? What concrete goals should the site help you achieve?

The goals themselves will vary, depending on the type of site. But whoever you are and whatever your site's mission, you'll find it's critical both for the project's health and your own to define success ahead of time.

By stating your goals, you

• Create attainable measures of success shared by everyone in the organization.

• Provide an objective framework for making decisions.

• Give company stakeholders a forum to voice their expectations.

• Force company stakeholders to sign off on goals, freeing the development team to meet them as they see fit.

• Help prevent meddling by accomplishing the above.

By defining (and writing down) your goals from the outset, you accomplish both practical and diplomatic purposes.

On the practical end, goals create quantifiable, and hopefully attainable, goals for the project. Over the course of development, the project team can consistently refer back to them, ensuring that the project's on track and that decisions made along the way support the overarching goals.

On the diplomatic front, these goals create a forum in which all an organization's stakeholders can voice their expectations and demands of the site (or site redesign). By gathering opinions on the site goals, consolidating them into a short list, and then getting approval on these stated goals, the producer sets herself, her team, and her site up for success. They now know what is expected of them, and they have the freedom to effectively do their jobs.

typical goals...

for a new site

• Reduce phone calls about hours and location

• Reduce bad leads by clarifying what your organization does (and doesn't do)

• Increase sales in store, or attendance at events, by using online promotions

• Convert existing offline customers or members into online customers or members

for a redesigned site

• Increase pageviews after a redesign

• Increase return visitors

• Increase number of registrations, purchases, or other completed transactions

what kind of goals?

The goals for your site will vary, of course, depending on its focus, but they may include things like increasing revenue, cutting costs, attracting and retaining more users, developing leads for new customers, reducing phone calls, building a mailing list, or raising the company's profile.

Whatever the specifics, your goals should meet two basic criteria.

The web site's goals should be

• Relevant to the organization's goals

• Measurable, so you can objectively gauge their success and track their progress

• Realistic, so the site can actually succeed.

This last point can't be stressed enough. Web sites may be powerful, but they're not magic. You can't expect them to right all your company's wrongs.

Dig Deeper

how to encourage collaboration, p. 330.

how to speak the language(s), p. 329.