What are the goals and purpose of your website?

Every project needs to begin with clearly defined and understood goals. This step in the website creation process is critical to development of your online strategies. An easy way to develop objectives that fit these parameters is to create SMART objectives. SMART is an acronym that means Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time specific. Creating a list of your website goals will help in the decision making process for content, navigation, theme and layout. Without goals, your web site will fail to deliver your content clearly.

Writing down what you are trying to achieve and who you are attempting to reach will help as you progress through the development stages for your site. This step must be referenced continuously to help maintain the focus of the project. Setting goals gives you the ability to break those goals down into smaller and more manageable tasks.

Clearly defined goals are also measurable. Your site will provide the information needed to gauge its success in the form of visitor feedback, number of visitors or how many sales you have made if you are running an e-commerce site.

Who are you creating this site for?

When creating a website, it is important to be familiar with your visitor’s potential needs and preferences. When you know these facts, you have created your target audience. When you know who your target audience is, you will be able to deliver relevant content and suit their needs. Following these steps will help you get the best possible feedback.

When analyzing this prospective audience, you must know the limits of your visitors, their knowledge of the subject matter and their feelings pertaining to your main topic. If you do not put your efforts into providing for your target audience, then the chances of having a successful website will not be possible.

Regardless of how you segment your visitors, your primary target audiences should be those who make up the bulk of the traffic that access your site. Once you have defined your target audience, you must learn how they relate to you and the content of your site.

Listen to what people are saying when they visit your site, or when you are visiting someone else’s site, pay attention to what they say to each other. Stop by some of the places your target audience might visit to get even more insight on their outside lives. Simply paying attention to the people who are coming to your site is a great way to get insights on what they are thinking.

As you learn more about your target audience, keep track of their opinions. Then decide what your primary objectives are. You want your visitors to spend more time on each visit. Using the information you’ve gathered about your target audience, you can then decide how to best achieve your objectives by creating a website to accommodate their various needs.

The more clearly you define your target audiences, the better you can reach them and encourage them to support your site. As you track the effectiveness of your site targeting different audiences, be sure to periodically update research data on your target market. Your visitors will become enlightened when they come to your site the first time and it is important for you to continually adapt so they have a reason to come back.

What type of website to create?

Once you have determined your target audience, the task of how to present information to them must be determined. There are many templates available for download, but coming up with your own turns out to be much more satisfying. Look at different sites relating to your content and write down the things you like and dislike. The look of the site needs to be inoffensive, meaning wild and flashing type or text that doesn’t show up well on the background. There is nothing worse than trying to read yellow text on a tan background.

Coming up with a theme for your website will help tie all your topics content. First look at your own strong points and interests. What areas do you have knowledge and experience in that might attract people to your site? You want to build a site that offers your visitors valuable content that is also search engine friendly. Do research on your topic and come up with content that is rich with relevant information that will attract users to your website. You will generate more traffic with better information and this should be one of the goals you have already specified.

The results of your efforts need to be an easy to use website structure with a simple navigation scheme in place. The site content needs to be easily updated which will allow you to effectively manage your website’s content in a current and timely fashion.

Providing information in an effective method

You have a target audience and you have a theme. Conveying your content is next on the list of tasks in creating a website. When you researched other sites, did you find their way of presenting information done in such a fashion that made it a pleasant visit? What would you have changed? Look at what could be added or subtracted to make the delivery of information a better experience. Make your website simple and to the point so your visitor isn’t distracted by unnecessary content. Another method of effective communication is giving your visitors the ability to send you feedback. If you are setting up a blog then allowing comments would be a way to for them to express their opinions. Information sites will have a contact page with an email address in case there might be some additional questions or if something in your content needs to be clarified, corrected or updated.

Determining your content

Start by figuring out what you are going to need. What media are you going to include? If you are including video on your site, then finding the programs to make that happen will need to be found. Getting the scripts for RSS feeds or feedback forms might be something to look into. When starting this process, create a project folder. This is where you will store all your research and anything else you feel is relevant to the development of your content.

An important thing to know about Web users when determining content is that they do not like to read large, unedited blocks of text. Users prefer sites where the content is more readable on their computer screen.

Chunking content is the process of breaking up large portions of text into smaller portions that are easier to read and faster to download. Put emphasis on the areas you want visitors to access most or first. Guide users to these areas by providing direct links on the index page.

The demographics of your target audience

Determining the demographics of your target audience directly affects how you design and market your website. Their age, sex, geographic location and how much they earn need to be taken into consideration when choosing colors, method of delivery and content. By creating a profile, you will be able to establish a way to deliver your content that will achieve the best results. Successful websites are based around users’ needs. In order to develop and maintain your website, you will need to consider all the aspects of your target audience. Create a list of questions to identify the demographics of the target audience and then develop a plan to meet their needs with your website.

The psychographics of your target audience

If you can figure out what your target audience is looking for, then you can come up with a way to give it to them. Psychographics pertain to the emotional and behavioral qualities of your target audience. They are the thought processes behind the decisions to examine your content. Psychographics include your visitor's interests, groups, activities they participate in and many others. Psychographics also allow you to analyze everything from motivations to the particular attitudes of people and the groups they belong to.