Purpose and Goals
Deciding and finding the purpose of your site and the goals you are trying to accomplish is the single most critical thing you must do when building a website.
You must know what your site is for and why it was created to develop it properly so that you can promote it effectively. This work begins in the earliest planning stage of your website, long before you launch Dreamweaver, Front Page or other web development tools. There are some questions you need to ask and answer before you start designing your website. The most important questions are:
- Why do you need a website?
- What is your goal or purpose?
- Who is your audience?
- What do you want to say to them? What is your message?
- How much time will you spend on updating your site? Fresh content draws visitors, stale content drives them away.
- What sorts of content will you include in the site? A blog? A bulletin board? FAQ’s?
- What kinds of functionality will you need (scripts, code, blogging software, databases, middleware etc.)?
These are the most critical questions you will need to answer before even beginning on the design of the website and even before you register your domain name. Having a well-thought out idea of what your goals are and why you are building the website makes all the other parts of the design and development a great deal easier, or at least more focused and task-oriented. You need to understand what your website is intended to do before you decide on what content belongs in your website and before you start to organize that content. You also have to understand who your visitors will be and why they will be coming to your site.
Not every website needs an “About” section. Very, very few websites need a “Mission Statement” and most surfers couldn’t care less about them unless you are a charity or political organization. Most sites will need ‘infrastructure’ such as an image folder and a folder for all the scripts, and separate folders for each section of the site, or each type of content.
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