Website strategy with a purpose

I’ve been involved with quite a few website reboots in my day, and I can tell you that the hardest part for everyone involved seems to be getting the ball rolling. It’s easy to recognize that your site needs some love. It’s even easy to point out what you don’t like, but that’s not the same as actually getting the ball rolling on your site.

So how do you get started? How do you decide what you want your site to accomplish? The amateur approach is to just throw everything you can think of on the home page, and the resulting site looks and feels (quite unsurprisingly) amateur.

Through trial and error I have found a tactic that has served me very well in figuring out how to get started with a site that doesn’t just look good, but also meets business objectives. The best part? The more complicated the project, the better this approach seems to work. Ready?

Get everyone who has a say in the project in a single room with a whiteboard. (For some websites that’s actually the hardest part.) Next you’re going to write the following words on the whiteboard:

• customer
• prospect
• employee
• partner
• media
• competition

These are the groups of people that will be looking at your site. Next to each word start writing down what that person would be looking for when they come to the site. Get everything up there on the board.

Now stand back and take a look at what you’ve got. It’s a big mess, isn’t it? You still have some work ahead of you, but now there’s some purpose to your website. Hand things over to your talented designer and copywriter, and it’s their job to build a site that addresses these needs.