Building a Web Site: Considerations

If you're thinking about creating or updating a web site for yourself or for your business, here are some questions and considerations to speed you along in a good direction.

Starting Out

Let's start out with some broad questions. 

• What are your overall goals for the site?  Long-term and short-term?  Possibilities include:
  • marketing or direct sales
  • information for your clients or customers about your company (i.e., marketing to your customers)
  • information for your clients or customers that they can use in their projects or tasks (i.e., service for your customers)
  • building a contact list for your company
• What exactly do you want on the site?
  • Where are you with your content development? Will you create the content (do the writing, create the images, video, audio, etc.) yourself, or do you want someone else to do it?
  • What kind of content besides text do you want (photos? audio? video? other?)?
  • Given your target audience, what kind of content will touch them?
• Is there any content that is highly dynamic? If so, who will keep it up-to-date?
• How do you want to coordinate your web site with any other marketing or informational materials you have?

Coordinating Print and Web

It seems like a web site and printed materials are - or ought to be - closely related. However, they are somewhat different in their natures. Here are some considerations about coordinating the two.

If you are considering making the site and your brochure or other printed material essentially the same:  That would be a little like taking KISS (in its glam-rock days) and some string quartet and trying to make them wear the same clothes. It's certainly possible to do it, but there are both benefits and drawbacks to it. 

Print materials are generally much more expensive to produce, because they require higher quality images (higher resolution), more precise formatting and more detailed planning.  Plus, once you print something, it's static.  A web site can be much more flexible.  You can put it up today and change it tomorrow and/or next Friday, etc., if you decide you want to say something more or differently. 

Also, web sites thrive more on redundancy and narrowly-focused page content than print materials do.  There are at least 2 reasons for this:

• it helps with search engine ranking
• the web page will (most of the time) receive a person's attention for a shorter amount of time

When we pick up a printed document, we give it a different kind of attention than we do a web page, and we have different expectations of it. Usually you want to squeeze every little bit out of a print page - get as much on it as possible so when folks see it they can get the broader picture.  On a web page, links serve that purpose, so you don't need all the content on one page.

Now, using the graphic design/page layout and content as a basis for creating print material (rather than a direct translation of web site to print material) is both possible and a pretty good idea.  This gives you consistency between your online and print materials, and makes use of the design effort in multiple areas.  And, certainly, text from printed material can be part of the web site.

Site Visibility/Marketing

In terms of site visibility/marketing, here are some things to think about.  

First, it's very important to get people to the site - otherwise all the splendid content in the world doesn't do any good.  You have several ways to do that:

• search engines
• links from other sites
• references from print ads/brochures/etc.
• personal references. 

The first two are big ones in terms of site design and your results.

So, for search engines, consider what search terms people might use that you'd want your page to respond to.  (Think of it as someone shouting out their front door, "Hey! Who out there knows anything about xyz?" For which "xyz" do you want your site to jump up and shout back, "I do!!!"?)

These kinds of words or phrases are the ones you want to feature in your site text. Here are some examples for different topics:

• fun-loving cohousing community
• radio interview arts
• big red tractor

It's usually much easier to rank well on searches that are more specific - plus, you get people who are actually interested in exactly what you offer.

Also consider what other web sites might get the kind of visitors who'd be interested in you and your business, and see if you can persuade them to link to you (often they want a link from your site to them in exchange).

Finally, consider the benefits and wonders of your service or products, and don't hesitate to be explicit about that on your web site.