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1. What is the purpose of your website and how does it fit in with your overall marketing strategy? In other words: Why are you doing this? Don't lose sight of your purpose in the glitter of web technology. The design of your site should compliment and enhance your site purpose. This common sense rule is often overlooked. Example purposes: sell a product or service, inform about an issue/idea, persuade people to a particular action, increase awareness of your organization, improve your organization's image, provide a service on-line instead of using traditional methods, because everyone else has a web site (this can be a valid purpose if the lack of website reflects negatively on your organization), etc. If you have more than one purpose in creating your website, examine whether the purposes are compatible. If not, you may want to consider developing sub-sites or mini websites within a larger website. For example, a lumber company may maintain two sites: one for the general public and one for contractors, where additional information and features would be available. Throughout the creative process of designing your website and preparing content, every element of your site should be weighed against the purpose. If the element doesn't further the purpose of your site, rework it or leave it out.

2. Who is your target audience? Your target audience is the people you want to visit your website. Of course, you want everyone to visit your web site, but you can't be everything to everybody. So you need to target your message to people who will be most responsive to it. You need to define this group of people as best as you can. Knowing your audience helps you meet their needs, whether it's a need for information, products or services. First, you want to be sure that your target audience uses the Internet. If not, they won't see your web pages. If you're not sure if your target audience is on-line, check Internet demographic information from Nielsen Net Ratings. Other demographic information for your audiences would be found from the same sources that provide market research information. Check your local library, trade assocation, census data or with a market research company. Then find out as much as you can about them. What are the demographics and psychographics for your audience? What other sites do they frequent? What is their Internet usage style? What are their needs (and how can you provide solutions)? This information about your audience can help you better design your website, and it will help you market your site later.

3. What types of web technology are accessible to your target audience? Not all web technology is accessible to all website visitors. Some features require certain types of web browsers to view the page or additional plug-in software installed on the visitor's computer. Not everyone has the newest browser. Not everyone is willing or able to download plug-in software. Many times visitors are using the Internet at work and have to follow company policies regarding software downloads. Make sure that the web technologies you plan to employ on your website are compatible with your audience.

4. How will you entice visitors to keep returning? This is about giving people what they want. Basic information about your organization is great, but after reading it once, why should they come to your site again? Many organizations put up a website that is really a virtual brochure, and then are disappointed by the lack of visitors to their web site. That's because people using the Internet expect more. To make your web site stand out from the competition, find a need in your target audience and provide a solution. Compared to other media, the costs of internet development are low. Most of the time it takes less time and resources than you might expect to give people more. Example: INSPIRE PURCHASES Trying to sell vacation packages? Offer users a weather forecast for Cancun, snow conditions in Aspen, or articles on the best hiking trails in Alaska. Example: PRODUCT REVIEWS You are much more likely to sell your inventory if you offer reviews of the products you are selling. Leverage your customers to write reviews, hire experts to write them or syndicate product reviews from a third party. Other ideas: updated information on an area of interest or concern to the audience, resource/expert information on a particular issue, technical specs for your product, online forms for conducting business, contests and prizes, tools that make their tasks easier (calculators, calendars, response forms, etc.), free stuff (graphics, back issues of your publication, patterns, recipes, etc.). Keep in mind that if you have more than one target audience, you might have more than one strategy for getting and keeping visitors.

5. How will you organize your information? Categorizing the information on your website is often the most difficult decision. Although visitors won't move through your website from beginning to end like a book, the book metaphor is helpful in thinking about site organization. There should be some sort of table of contents, similar information should be grouped together, information should flow from simple to complex, and related topics should be cross-referenced. Think about the information you want to offer and what you know about your audience, then try to determine if you should build a wide, shallow site (with many categories, but less content in each category) or a narrow, deep site (with few categories, but many subcategories). Next map out your site structure by categorizing your content into top level categories and subcategories.

6. How will you measure success? If you don't know what constitutes success for your website, you'll never know when you get there. There are different ways to measure success for web sites; choose one that fits with the purpose of your site. Some of the information used to evaluate success, such as number of visitors or number of hits, will come from analyzing the server log files for your website. Using logs files, you can find out which sites are linking to you, what words and phrases were used at search engines to find you, what pages visitors looked at, and much more. You can also measure the success of your website by: the number of new visitors, the number of repeat visitors, the number of pages viewed , sales/marketing leads generated, actual sales of products or services, number of information requests, visitor feedback, reduced client support calls/expense, contest entries, etc. Traffic Guide It's important to track the traffic to your website so that you can continue to effectively market your site. There are a number of ways to look at traffic. Counters The most common, but least informative way to to look at traffic is to track hits or page views. This is what counters at the bottom of web pages do; they count the number of times that a web page is viewed. However, this is not the same as the number of people viewing your web page. A count is recorded every time a visitor loads or reloads a page. For example: if a visitor starts on the homepage, goes to another page and then comes back to the homepage, the counter will show two hits. As you can see, one visitor can generate lots of hits. And to complicate matters, that visitor might be you. Many people check their own web pages regularly without realizing that their visits are boosting the hit counter. Server Log Files A much better way to track website traffic is to analyze your server log files. Every time someone visits your website, your web server records what they looked at, for how long, what browser they used, what kind of computer they have, what they downloaded, which website they came from, and even what keywords they used at a search engine to find your site. All this information is compiled into a log file and can be mined for important demographic data and traffic trends.

7. Who will manage your website project? Creating a web site can be fun and everyone loves to have input, but someone in your organization should have final authority over content and design. Although you may have a web development team with different individuals having authority over different aspects of the website, someone needs to coordinate the overall development and ensure that project goals are being met. Have a plan ahead of time to resolve conflicts. Know who will make the final decision if agreement cannot be reached. Generally it's best to bring people into the planning process early, so that they don't reject the basic assumptions your site is built upon after you spent many hours creating content and graphics. Remember that 72 percent of the cost of a website is in maintaining the site. Have a plan for managing updates to content, analyzing usage for your website, and continually marketing your site.