Anyone Out There?

Who is your audience? Now that you know what your site is for, imagine who will use it. How old are they? Are they male or female?

Try to get inside their heads. What are their interests? What other sites do they visit? What do they want from you? Some people find it helpful to invent characters representing different types of visitors and imagine them using the site.

If you are revamping an existing site you already have valuable information about your customers in your server log files. Use a log analysis package to identify the least popular pages or sections of your site.

Terms people entered into search engines to find you are good indicators of their interests. And looking at the paths people take through your site can indicate where navigation is confusing or suggest areas that could be expanded.

Whatever the overall goal of your site, remember it must please the end users if it is to succeed. Look at it from their point of view and try to provide information and services of value to them.

Gotta Getta Goal

How will you know you succeeded? It's easy to say, "The goal of my site is to sell more widgets." Or "We want to increase page views and hence advertising revenue." But how will you know when you have achieved your goal?

Try to come up with some specific, measurable objectives related to your primary goal. For example, "We expect the new Web site to increase sales of widgets by 30 percent in the first six months."

Goal setting is important for at least two reasons:

Goals give you a target. If everyone working on the project keeps this target in mind, it will focus individual efforts on the tasks that need to be done to achieve it. With proper planning, you can evaluate how the designer's proposals will advance your goals. For instance, if that cool 500K Flash movie on the home page doesn't contribute to a specific objective, dump it.

Goals let you measure results. If after six months sales have only increased by 10 percent, what went wrong? Were your objectives realistic? What could you have done differently? Of course, if sales increase by 60 percent, you can give yourself a well-earned pat on the back.

It needn't take a long time to come up with answers to these questions. Doing this preliminary groundwork will help your Web designer come up with an appropriate solution and save you expensive consultancy time. While this approach doesn't guarantee success, it will greatly improve your chances of building a Web site that works.