Before you begin building a site, you will need to understand what your client wants, and you'll want to have some kind of strategy. Here are some questions that will help you think about your strategy.

1) Why is having a website or redesigning your existing website important to your business or organization at this point in time?

• gets to the heart of what the initial impetus is all about
• what do they think they need
• this will let you know a little more about how to deal with your client

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2) What are your goals and objectives?

An extremely important step. You need to find out what your client hopes to achieve with the site, and this is really the best time to do that. Also, this will help you immensely when it comes time to write the communications plan, because you'll know what it is you're trying to achieve with the site.

Defining goals:

• get everyone in organization involved
• get agreement on content and purpose, but you build it
• determine who your key players/decision makers are
• formal or informal definition of goals?
• Ask questions:
  • mission or purpose of the organization?
  • short- and long-term goals of the site?
  • why will people visit your site?
  • What do you want the web site to do for you?

Most important: who are the intended audiences?

• spend some time on this getting them to list all the potential audiences
• rank them so that you can put the messages and goals in order
• recognize that audiences differ in their behaviours and web usage

Compile the answers:

• if you have a lot of answers, get them into organized lists
• get people to rank the answers in importance
• filter that into a final list to get approved

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3) What is your budget for the project?

It goes without saying that this will have an impact on how you go about delivering the site, and what can go into it.

Web combines a lot of different skills, the right combination of:

• analysis
• research
• project planning
• budget, technology management
• communications and marketing
• measurement
• business awareness and return on investment
• dedicated resources including highly trained people.

Your budget will determine who you can add to the project team. Your choices are:

• web communications analyst
• web developer
• programmer
• graphic designer
• graphic user interface specialist
• marketing
• writers (content)
• usability experts
• etc.

4) Has the time line for this project already determined?

A subset of the budget problem. Often time is your limiting factor. If there is not enough time, you can think about producing the site in stages

5) Is this part of a long-term strategy?

How long-term is their thinking?
Can you help them leverage the site?

6) Who is the ideal consumer of your web site and why?

Who is their audience?
Do they know?
M most people have a feeling about who it is, but they haven't done a market analysis.

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7) Have you done a market analysis in the past two years?

An evaluation of their audience and what they are looking for:

• how do your consumers perceive your business/services?
• what is the unique selling proposition (usp) of your site
• is the web site part of your overall marketing and business plan?

8) What do you want a web consumer to be able to do on your site?

This ties 7 and 6 together and is another major component of your strategy.

Write Scenarios:

Go back to your audience list: write a scenario for each person on the list

Giive them a goal to complete on the site, and how they do it.

• What is the experience that people are going to have when they come to your site?
• What will they be looking for?
• How will they find it?
• From your visitor's point of view, imagine that they have a specific goal - think about how they meet this goal? For example, I want to buy a copy of the Hitchikers Guide the Universe on Amazon. What is my experience going to be like?

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9) Who are your top 5 competitors?

Another important part of your strategy. You have to get the client to do this, and you should do this yourself.

Analyse other sites:

• What do you like?
• What do you hate?
• What would you like to emulate?
• What are your "competitors" doing?

Chart their approach with an analysis similar to what we've been doing in class:

• Content
• Graphic Design
• Technology
• Usability
• Interactivity

-give it all a number from one to ten
-include existing site if there is one
-continue to do this

10) What is it your competitive advantage?

-in addition to your USP, what is obviously something you can do better than the competitors

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Next ten questions for strategy, p. 2...>