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Questions To Answer Before Designing Your Website

By: Peter Brittain

When you are designing a new website or re-designing your old one, it is imperative that you first have a clear mental picture of what you want from your site. Use the following questionnaire to make the process easy. It will save you a lot of trouble later on.

1. What type of a website do you want? - Your site can be a brochure site with a small introductory message about your company. Alternatively, it can be an entertainment site drawing visitors through entertainment still providing topic and company information, an E-commerce site selling stuff through affiliates, or a community site aimed at building a community.

2. What are the reasons for building a site? - Are you providing customer services, selling a product, providing general or product specific information, want to earn more money, mark your presence on the web, or any other reason?

3. What goals do you wish to achieve through your site? - You must take into consideration both your short-term and long-term goals. Define a measuring technique to determine the website’s success rate.

4. What is the nature of your business? - Prepare a brief note on what ever your business offers by way of products or services, their distinctive features and what would be the areas that you would like to reach.

5. How will the site figure in your marketing plan? - Do you want the site to be informative, unusual, innovative, educational, supportive etc. and whether you have thought over design elements to support your vision while building the site. Do you stand in need of customized graphic support or you are able to supply all images and other inputs.

6. What e-commerce solution are you targeting? –

It is necessary to establish the following:
• Whether you want a non-interactive site where visitors are required to print out order forms, fill them and fax the order, or place an order over the phone.
• A single page order form which sends orders via e-mail
• Multi-page order forms that includes a shopping cart and allows visitors to select products as they look through your site, change orders if they want to and preview the order before submitting it online. Do customers communicate orders via email, or do they download through FTP.
• A complete e-commerce solution with shopping cart and fully automated real time credit card processing that is linked to a backend database.

7. Do buying seasons affect sales? - This will let you understand if your site needs changes for the different seasons and what you will have to do to entice people to shop off-season.

8. How will you keep the website current? - The information on your site needs updating from time to time. You must decide in advance, who is going to create fresh content and update it. If you have an interactive site, then who is going to answer emails and phone calls.

9. Do you require domain registration? - Keeping your budget in view, you must determine your domain registration and web hosting service requirements including yearly maintenance.

Article Source: http://www.articlekingpro.com

Peter is a director of northland digital agency which owns web design company slinky web design, and writes earth movin media, a web design blog.

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