Do You Have a Website Strategy?

A quick and simple way to create a website strategy to accomplish your website goals.

Before you ever think about building a website there are two things you need to decide. The first is the goal of your website. Second, you need to have a strategy for accomplishing your goal because your site will not be successful if you do not have a plan for getting and converting customers. Success doesn't just happen by chance. It needs a more help than that.

Strategy narrows the focus and purpose of a project to make it as effective as possible. Strategy helps contain the scope of work, direct the content creation process, and provide tactical direction to information architects. It also allows designers to design instead of just making pretty pictures, and it keeps developers focused on the right features. And, once the website has launched, you can keep the strategy around to help market the site through SEM and SEO.

Here is a quick and easy way to create a website strategy that I recently read about on A List Apart. It is as simple as fill in the blank.

To convince ... (your target customer here)
To ... (action you want them to take)
Instead of ... (action you are replacing)
Because ... (the main reason they should take this action. Also known as your unique value proposition)

For example, your strategy statement might read like this:

We are building a website to convince business owners who need a website to create a strategy before they start building a website instead of throwing one together helter-skelter because it will save them money down the road, give them a way to determine if they are meeting their goals, and give them something by which they can gauge the necessity of "additional features".

Once you have created a strategy, you need to identify points of action where people will be making decisions. At each point of action, you need to have a strategy to resolve their concerns, so that they will continue with the action you want them to take. This helps round out both your offensive and defensive website strategy.

You never knew that creating a web strategy could be so easy did you? The best part about having a strategy is that you can constantly realign your website to your strategy to make sure you are accomplishing your goals.

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Filed Under: Strategy, Goals, Website, Points of Action, Website Design

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