5 Tips to Planning a New Website
- What has been missed? Is there anything major that needs to be reconsidered?
- What are resources available to build the website? When it comes to maintenance, do you have the bandwidth to keep each of the website sections active and current? If not, can you hire help (One of the biggest problems with business websites is that they are not maintained)?
- Does each of requirements help to deliver a better site overall? If not, what can be chopped or scaled back?
- Is possible to retrofit the new requests into the existing site or is a new build required?
- Does the plan meet the goals of the stakeholders?
2. Evaluate technology and costs
Speak to your CEO, CIO, your company's tech guru or work with a consultant. What Content Management System (CMS) will you use? Will the site be designed with HTML, CSS or Javascript? Does the internal team have the appropriate skills? Will you use responsive design so the site can be viewed properly on mobile devices (by January of 2014, 50% of all website traffic will be from mobile devices!).
Determine the cost associated with completing your project and any other costs or projects the new website may impact (e.g., a new URL means reprinting business cards, updating online listings, etc.). Weigh the costs against the revenue impact of meeting the stated goals. Measuring the return on investment for website design is extremely difficult but some measurements you can consider are:
- Longer visits. When clicking on a website, people decide the credibility of a company in as little as 1/20th of a second. But the longer people are in a store, the likelier they are to buy. How many more leads would you have at the end of a month if ten percent more of visitors read your site instead of leaving right away?
- Optimization for business objectives. Don't waste time on fancy applications, superfluous animation or other mechanisms. Your design should serve business objectives or enhance usability—everything else is useless. You can measure by calculating how much your costs decrease and traffic increases when you eliminate unnecessary design elements.
- Shopping cart abandonment. The average shopping cart abandonment rate is 59.8%. Think about investing in a better shopping cart. If you average $100 per sale, imagine what your ROI would be if completed checkouts were increased by 10%.
3. Map out the process
