Key Website Design Objectives for Your Business

‍Why do you need a website, or a website re-design? I'd like to think that we've passed the stage where people or companies get a website simply to have an online presence. Websites can be so much more that just online brochures these days.

Sure, having an online presence is essential for the vast majority of businesses today but that should not be the primary reason for having one. If you don't have a website yet, then yes, it's one of the reasons by default but other than that, or if you're re-designing your website - why?

To ensure your time and money is not wasted, to ensure you get good ROI, you need a clear set of business objectives for your website. You need objectives that justify your investment and not only that, you need as much as possible to be able to measure these objectives to see if your website is meeting them.

Some objectives are obvious. For an e-commerce

It comes down to what your objectives as a business are as a whole. In most cases, your website is there to help meet your overall business objectives whether it be to increase revenue, hire qualified staff, increase leads etc.

A good website owner seeks to understand the challenges faced by the company and others in the company and looks for ways that the website can help with those issues.

You need to understand the context of your website or web project relative to what your business goals are.

One problem that occurs when writing business objectives is that they often become vague. For business objectives to be most effective, they need to be as specific as possible.

For example, having a business objective such as "generating more leads" is too generic and could lead you to

I hope this goes someway to convince you to think carefully about what you are trying to achieve with your website. Remember, without clearly defined objectives, there is nothing to inform the numerous decisions to be made during the design and development of your site.

Here are some action points to take away:

1. Define what objectives the website should meet. If multiple objectives are defined, it’s important that you prioritize them.
2. Clarify what the success criteria will be in order to measure the effectiveness of the website in terms for meeting your objectives.
3. Constantly evaluate the website’s objectives and ask if its overall vision and direction need changing.