Questions to answer before you start a website project
Creating and maintaining a great website is a huge responsibility.
The questions below are intended to help define the project, priorities, goals, and get ideas flowing in general.
- Do you have a corporate identity/brand (or at least a logo)?
- What is your domain name?
- Who are you? What is your company? What are your products or services? What does your company do?
- Please list 5 (or more) adjectives to describe your company.
- Who is your competition? What are they doing right or wrong online?
- Tell us why you, your products or your services are better than your competition (both online competitors from question 5 and offline competition)?
- Who is your target audience (primary and secondary)? Define the average user as best you can.
- How technically savvy is your typical visitor?
- What are your online goals? What do you hope/plan to achieve from the website project you are engaging in?
- What do you want your visitor to do when they get to your site? (Call you, complete the contact form, make a purchase or donation, etc.)
- Why will people visit your site? When people don’t know you exist, why would they find you or happen upon your site? Why would they come back? If they do know you, why would they take the time to visit your site?
- Most clients think users will just come to their site. This question helps them focus on why an average Jane or John Doe may end up on their site. Many brochure sites get most of their visits from people looking for an address or phone number. You can create a one page website for that. This helps the client focus on what the site’s real goals should be.
- List 5 websites you like and the web address. What do you like about each site? Could anything be better? (It is okay to like only parts of a site too.)
- List 5 websites you don’t like and the web address. What don’t you like about these sites?
- Define any functionality needed on your website (member area, interactive form(s), content management system, calendar, custom application). For each feature, please state the goal.
- How many pages will your website have?
- Do you have information for each web page? Will you need help writing or editing the page information?
- What additional website services are you interested in? [ check all that apply and number for priority ]
- What is your budget?
- What is your timeline?
- When are you planning to choose a vendor and get started? What will be the process for selecting a vendor? Who is the decision maker?
Once you have these questions answered (or at least started), you can intelligently start discussions with a local web company. Your answers will help define the scope of work and costs involved.