Define objectives clearly for your first website

Plan Your Website Before You Start Building It

Before you roll up your sleeves and start designing Web pages, take the time to examine your motivation for creating a website and to develop and refine your ideas within the context of what's possible to build your website. In the process, don't even think about tools and utilities of how you would build it. To build a great website, you must define its objectives. Only then can you define and prioritize the usability aspects of your site to meet the needs of your intended users.

When setting your objective, it may help to think in terms of awareness, interest, trial, and repeat visitors. These concepts are often used in marketing course taught in business schools. While there are different approaches to setting objectives, one of the best is to develop a single objective for a site, which may encompass more than one approach to business building. You can, of course, later enhance on it. However, stay close to your basic need of building a website.

You can come up with some fantastic and good reasons for building a web page. It is extremely essential to have clear goals and objectives. The clearer, the better. It will show when you design your website and write content for it. Many people build home pages as a hobby, purely for their own personal development. Others build them to promote business, social, cultural, or humanitarian objectives.

Take time now to define your purpose for creating a website - what challenges you are hoping to meet, what tasks you are hoping to simplify - and how you intend to present your website to the rest of the online folks.

Besides building your own website for your own objectives, you can the knowledge of web page development. That, in turn, can help you in your career. Many businesses today have their own corporate Intranet sites, which are simply internal Internet systems used to share corporate information. The ability to communicate electronically is a valuable skill to most employers.

One of your objectives can also be to, at the some point down the road, when you have lots and lots visitors coming to your website, you can sell empty or blank spaces to advertisers to make some extra money.

That is a potential that you can think about when you start designing your website. Eventually, almost everybody does it. You can examine some websites and blogs for that purpose. The column on the right side, called sidebar, consists of banners from a variety of advertisers. If you pick your advertisers of the same subject or topic, that's for the better.

This is done by publishing interesting pages that attract large numbers of visitors and then selling advertising space, goods or services from those pages.

Judging by the vast number of home pages that contain little more than the builder's name, age, and a photograph of the family cat, it would appear that many web page developers have not clearly defined their objectives!

Some of the objectives can be defined as follows. These are all self-explanatory if you really think about them.

Distribute information - to the online folks
Faster Information
Build awareness of your organization
E-commerce - sell products and services
Build relationships - like facebook and such
Develop a new marketing strategy or perhaps reinforce a current strategy
Build awareness of a particular brand or service
Lower Operating Costs
Manage an event
Enhance Customer Service
Collect market research
Et cetera, Et cetera, Et cetera.

In a Nutshell
You can ask yourself a question. Do I feel .... Seriously, the question must be "what are you basically trying to achieve?" One of the biggest problems when building a website is how to work out and communicate what your site is going to do and who is the site for. You can save time and money by focusing on the very basic reason why and what you want to achieve with your website.

Always remember what a great guy once said - with a little twist of words.
"Ask first not how you can do a job. Ask first what you want to do and why."