Strategic Web Site Design For Success
Website Strategy Key Part of Business Communications
Jul 20, 2009
The website strategy should first consider how the site fits within the organization’s overall business practices. For small businesses, the website plan will fall under marketing and operations in the business plan. For non-profit social service organizations, the website plan may fit under community relations and fundraising.
Communications professionals should lead the planning of an organizational website as the strategic communications skills can focus on defining objectives and applying a creative, inclusive process to deliver a site that engages key audiences.
Design a Website With Purpose
To start, the purpose of the site should be defined by reviewing the reasons for bringing the organization online. These reasons can include a need to decrease costs, improve community relations and public relations, sell products directly from the site or to increase sales.
Next, define communications objectives for the site. If the intention is to increase sales by generating sales leads, identify how many calls or emails created by the website would be considered success.
Objectives related to improving public relations may include defining the improved tone and messages of media coverage garnered through the website.
Work With Good Website Designers to Develop Guide
The next task in developing a website is to create a style guide that addresses the look and feel. Work with experienced website designers to brainstorm content for a guide that should include the domain name of the site. Other style questions to consider include:
- What content should be included to achieve objectives?
- Is the site intended to be simply a web presence, similar to an online brochure?
- Is e-commerce needed to allow customers to buy products?
- What colors, photographs and graphics will be used consistently to allow the website to be strong, clear and readable?
- What fonts will be used?
- How will customers interact with the organization using the website? Is there a section for customer inquiries or complaints?
- Is the organization local or global? The website will need to be translated if all or parts of it need to appeal to people or cultures in other parts of the world.
- How can the website development and management be included as part of a communications operating budget?
- Will the site run from the organization’s internet service provider, server or outsourced to a web hosting company?
- How can you use social media to create site interactivity?
Effective Business Communications Uses Website Design as a Strategy
Next, create a site map by drawing a box representing the home page near the top of a page. Create a box under the home page for each major section (products, FAQ, search, contact, etc.). Draw lines between the boxes and the home page to indicate how each should be linked. Think about how these navigational elements relate to your business communications strategy.
Under each section, add boxes for additional pages and lines from those boxes to the section box. Continue creating boxes to represent web pages and drawing lines to connect them to other pages. When complete, this site map should contain each page on the website.
It is also important to consider how the website will be kept updated. Ideally, the site becomes part of one or two people’s jobs with periods of daily work time devoted to its upkeep using the website plan as a key guide.
Creating an effective website takes good planning. When a communications professional is tasked to produce a website, think about how best to mount a phase one of the site based on solid communications objectives and planning.
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