The development of your website involves an important decision-making process. A key factor in the process is the consideration of how potential clients or customers will interact with your site.

The success of your website, and possibly your entire business rests on how you address that issue

When you begin the process of setting up a website, here are some questions that you should consider:

1.What is the one overall message that a customer should take away with them when they leave your website?

2.How does your website make your customers feel?

3.How can your product or service best be explained to the customer in a simple and concise manner?

4.How can the customer be guided to buy/buy now?

5.How can you encourage the customer to come back?

6.How can you get your customer to bring you additional customers?

Planning a Website is a two-part process

First Part -- You gather your development partners, analyze your needs and goals, and work through the development process outlined here to refine your plans.

Second Part --- create a site specification document that details what you intend to do and why, what technology and content you'll need, how long the process will take, what you will spend to do it, and how you will assess the results of your efforts. The site specification document is crucial to creating a successful site, as it is both the blueprint for your process and the touchstone you'll use to keep the project focused on your agreed goals and deliverables.

Remember Websites are developed by groups of people to meet the needs of other groups of people. Unfortunately, Web projects are often approached as a "technology problem," and projects are colored from the beginning by enthusiasms for particular Web techniques or browser plug-ins (Flash, digital media, XML, databases, etc.), not by real human or business needs. People are the key to successful Web projects. To create a substantial site you'll need content experts, writers, information architects, graphic designers, technical experts, and a producer or committee chair responsible for seeing the project to completion. If your site is successful it will have to be genuinely useful to your target audience, meeting their needs and expectations without being too hard to use.


Although the people who will actually use your site will determine whether the project is a success, ironically, those very users are the people least likely to be present and involved when your site is designed and built. Remember that the site development team should always function as an active, committed advocate for the users and their needs. Always involve real users, listen and respond to what they say, test your designs with them, and keep the website easy to use, and the project will be a success.


Source:
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/things-to-consider-when-developing-a-website-website-development.html
http://website-design-melbourne.blogspot.com/2007/06/developing-new-website-planning.html

This entry was posted on Monday, September 3, 2007 at 2:20 AM and is filed under , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments feed .

1 comments

hey there
im the creative head for a small event management company and one of our clients wants to develop a website for around 300 dollars, i read your articles and thought u might be interested in doing it if so let me know.

September 5, 2007 at 4:22 AM

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