If you need to find something on the internet, all you need to do is type a keyword/s in major search engines like Google and Yahoo! and you’ll find a lot of websites that matches your what you are looking for. But if you want to pay particular attention on the functionality of a site, you need to be able to differentiate wants and needs. If you want to define your website strategy, it should be incorporated in your marketing plan and not only restricted in meeting your website objectives.
Most websites are made for marketing purposes and provide only the basic information about a company. What you need to do is set your website as a marketing tool that will help in your overall marketing plan. At the same time, it should be an interactive extension of the business which will allow your visitors to communicate with you.
The first thing that you need to do is jot down all the things that you want your website to achieve. Your choices may vary from distributing information, offering customer support, survey tool or purely for promotion or advertising. There are some websites that want to offer everything but the common website visitor will only check few pages of the website and will lose interest if the site is large and complicated.
If you already have a list that you want to accomplish, you can now group them and identify which among the group should be your priority. Afterwards, you can evaluate these goals against those currently occurring in your site and your marketing plan. Through this, you will be able to determine the gap between what is happening on your site and your goals that you want to achieve in your website.
You also need to be able to separate what you want and what you need. Of course, you want your website to have the best of everything but you do not know if it will give you positive results or will just be a cause of additional expense. Knowing who will visit your site and how often they will come back will help you determine what features should be seen in your website.
If you have a draft of your priorities, it will enable you to know what should be done first. If it will allow you to bring about marketing benefits, you should include it as long as it is supported by the current browsers. If your list includes items that do not match your site goals, then it is better to implement it at a later time. If you have a limited budget, it will be practical to prioritize what needs to be included in your site.
Since marketing plans can change any time, you need to be prepared to change your strategies as well to meet with the changing market. Planning involves a lot of time and requires hard work. At the same time, you need to be knowledgeable for your tactics to work. In order to accomplish this, you need to understand your website goals and what is required to get it.
