You should be absolutely clear before designing and building your site what the purpose is going to be. If it is to make money, then you need to resolve how you intend to do this eg through selling products, advertising revenue, or perhaps subscriptions. If it is to build brand awareness, then it must tie into your mission statements and core messages, and it is wise to consider how you will lead people to the areas where you do make sales. If it is purely because you are passionate about a particular subject, or want to change the world, or educate people, then you need to consider how your website will achieve this.
The purpose of your website will affect the functionality you will need to build into your site eg e-commerce and a shopping basket, interactivity or community building eg a forum, customer relationship management, autoresponders, and so on. It is also essential to consider your business plan and direction for the future. It may be that you do not need all the bells and whistles at the outset, but it is wise to have a roadmap to follow, and know your budget. This will affect many of the choices you make – the tools that are available to you, the functionality you can add at the beginning and later on, your marketing strategy and more, so it is a very good idea to work out how much you can afford to spend, and when.
To establish what your website will look like and how to build and structure it, the best method to do this is through an information architecture process. Using this method will enable you to consider the present and future, the audience, the content, how to present this content, structure and navigation, functionality required, usability, and the end user or customer.
The IA process will lead you through all the considerations you need to make, and if you also use visitor profiling this will give you a clear picture of who your target audience is and how to speak their language and deliver what they require.
Once you understand the direction your website or blog will be taking, it will become clear which tools are appropriate for the task, For instance, if you are going to have a blog, but want to sell ebooks or info products related to your sector, then you will need a method of taking payments and delivering the products. If you are selling actual products, you need to consider how to tie your back end systems into your shopping cart. If you intend to offer advertising on your site, you will need a banner management tool or similar.
When building a more complex website, there are so many different tools for the job, it is important that you make the right decision at the outset because re-building the website can be a costly process. Understanding what functionality you will need, now and in the future, means you can consider the options more carefully for your website build.
Once you are clear about who your audience is and what functionality you require to deliver to that audience, then you need to start to work on the structure of your site. Obviously, the content will grow over time, but it is important to future proof the structure of your site and the navigation. Once you have regular visitors, they will not take kindly to you suddenly changing where everything is on the website.
Hope this blog post was helpful to you, – - Clarifying the purpose and information architecture process – -
Spunky Jones.
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