Five questions before building a new website

A new website is most often commissioned because the old one "looks dated". That is a legitimate reason but a poor starting point. A website that only looks better while working the same will bring the same results as before.

These five questions require no technical knowledge, and the answers shorten the project and reduce its cost.

1. What should the visitor do?

Send an inquiry, call, buy, sign up, download a document? Choose one main action. The whole website is then arranged to lead to it, and everything that distracts moves to the background.

2. Who is that visitor?

A director comparing three offers reads differently from a specialist looking for a technical detail. Describe two or three typical visitors and the questions they arrive with. The website should answer those questions, not the ones you wish they would ask.

3. Who will write and maintain the content?

Texts and photographs are the most common cause of delay. Decide who prepares them and who will update the website after launch. If there is nobody, five pages that are accurate are better than twenty that go stale.

4. How will we know it works?

Agree in advance what you measure: inquiries, sales, sign-ups. Without that, success is judged by impression, and impressions change from meeting to meeting.

5. What must the website connect to?

Forms that end up in someone's inbox, a price list kept in another system, member sign-in, payment. Every integration is part of the project and should be mentioned at the start, not a week before launch.

What to do with the answers

With answers to these five questions a contractor can give an offer that relates to your actual business, and you can compare offers that talk about the same thing. If you would like to go through them together, get in touch.