Get It In Writing

I just finished reading Startup Daddy’s post, Starting A Business: Define Your Definite Major Purpose & Envision Your Desired Outcome. The post focuses on the concept of defining one’s purpose, as in what’s your purpose in going into business. It speaks about the importance of defining one’s goals, both personal and professional, and how that helps in selecting your niche.

New web entrepreneurs often ignore this step when building a new website. You need to establish your site’s purpose. If you don’t, you risk a lack of focus that will cascade throughout your web presence, inhibiting SEO planning,  online marketing efforts and many times delaying site completion. You can’t select the best keywords, write good ad copy or build effective conversion paths without site focus.

Just like your business, your website needs a sound plan. That plan should be built before you ever speak with a web designer. In business its called a business plan. In the techie world, we call that plan a requirements document.

Building the Document, Then the Website

Start your document off with a purpose– literally.  Write down a few sentences about your business. In this summary include what you do, how you do it and your market segment. Don’t forget to include any differentiators.

Follow this with a short paragraph about the reasons you desire a website. Try to match your need for a website, with the summary of your business. This purpose will provide scope to your web project.

Determine Required Site Sections

List out all the sections that need to be included in your site. If you can diagram them using Visio or some other tool, that would be great.

Next you want to describe the pages to be included in each section. The ‘Services’ section of your site will have a Services landing page, and most likely a page for each Service you offer. 

Now list what you want included on each of the pages listed under each section. Include images, cross promotion, forms or widgets.  For forms and widgets, be specific about what functionality should be included.  For forms list the fields that should be included, what to do with the form information and designate required fields.

Add the Icing

Now list pages, content or functionality that would be nice to have, but not mission critical. This might seem like wasted effort, but it helps to understand future goals when designing your current website.

Now You’re Covered

Your requirements document provides insurance on your design investment. When working with a professional web designer or firm, you have more security. Get the designer to sign the form, recognizing it represents what will be delivered.  This prevents confusion with billing. It also helps recuperate penalty fees for missed deadlines.