Posted on June 11th, 2010Are you trumpeting your favorite cause? Publicizing a political candidate? Or simply looking for a job? Observe verbs in these examples. They’re the important factors in determining a site’s purpose.
What do you need to accomplish?
Just having an interesting topic isn’t enough – you should have a purpose, too. A topic is only what a site is about; while a purpose is what the site should do. Say, for instance, you want to set up a site about dogs. Okay, that’s a great starting point. You love dogs – they can be cute, aggressive and helpful; many people share the same interest. But why do you need to create a specialized site about them? Is there an interesting to say? Do you have an opinion to share, information to give, or a specific perspective that you need to put across? You may not need to earn a PhD in Cynology (study of dogs) to create a dog-related site, because you just want to discuss a few things about those funny-looking canines. But you should have a purpose, if not the site may not survive its first year.
Even if you spent years plowing through the Internet to assemble together the world’s most comprehensive collection of dog links, but why do you struggle so much? Do you have a purpose? If your purpose in creating a dog site is only for your own personal fun, you shouldn’t devote too much effort with the site. As a matter of fact, you can just build a one-page site or a simple blog. If you wish to have an influential site on dogs, however, you should take into account the expectations of most visitors, and also your own requirements for developing such a site. Say that you’re creating your dog site for the sole purpose of sharing all you know about these carnivores with the humankind, how does that purpose influence your approach to site development and design? You should publish more than just a few short articles, images and a couple of links. All things that you do with your site must help visitors understand its purpose. If you choose the domain name, for example, you need to pick one that clearly identifies your site’s content – for example www.dog-tips-and-facts.com.
The site purpose should trickle down through all steps that you take in developing it. You need to ensure that titles on your site specify how it backs up the site’s purpose. All textual contents on your pages need to lead smoothly into some specific aspects of the topic that can further your goals. All graphical images must emphasize or drive home your critical points.
Who are your visitors?
Identify the people you want to visit the site? What cultural or geographical groups do you want your site to appeal to? If you don’t have at least general ideas of the potential audience, you won’t have a good idea about what kind of site to develop.
If information is available about visitor characteristics for similar sites, you should track it down. But how do you find it? Amazingly, most of the information is available from the sites you’re competing with. Anyone who has been involved in any kind of corporate intelligence task would be aghast to see how people on the internet casually throw around priceless information.
Some sites offer links to web analytics service and a quick examination of the server logs may provide you with valuable insights into the kind of people who go to sites similar to the one you are creating.
What outside assistance do you need?
Do you want to devote your own time and effort in developing the site? Presumably, you are going to at least plan the overall design and make a few key decisions about contents. Probably, you’ll do the actual site itself. If not, you should make sure that those who are doing the development tasks know what they are doing and you need to know exactly what you should expect of them.
When looking for qualified people to develop your Website, never rely on paper certifications, college degrees, and the like. These are a few tips for determining how good they really are:
- Ask candidates to show you their earlier works. If they don’t carry a sample DVD, at least ask them about sites they worked on previously.
- Scrutinize their other Web sites. Find anything interesting and ask for explanations later.
- Check everything to judge whether the candidate has the required skills and experience to implement certain web elements. At least, make sure the site navigates properly – a site that has too many broken links is a badly maintained one.
If your site is really important, don’t give it to your Uncle Jack’s extremely smart cousin, if he’s only 14 years old and doesn’t seem to have the required experiences to develop a serious web site. Other than creating site elements, you should consider where your site will reside. You may decide if you are able to run your own Web server or find a web hosting company. The benefit of owning your own Web server is that you get a total control. However, the benefit of leasing either a Web server is that there would be a hundred fewer things to worry about. This will allow you to concentrate on other important tasks -managing your Web site.