Five Questions to Ask Before Starting Your Website Design Project

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Five Questions to Ask Before Starting Your
Website Design Project
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• Making the decision to develop a brand new
  website for your business or organization is
  serious business. Youre going to invest some
  time, energy, and money to create a new online
  home, so of course you want to do things the
  right way. At New Frame Creative, a successful
  project means a finished product that works hard
  and delivers great results for your organization.

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• To help get your project off on the right foot,
  here are a few of the questions we ask to help us
  get started.
• 1) What are your goals for your new website?
• Often your new website design project is
  happening for a reason such as the old one was
  ugly or weve never really had a website
  before. These arent bad reasons at all, but if
  youre going to go into all of the effort of
  creating your new site, it is worth making sure
  your web strategy is in line with the overall
  goals of your business or organization. Some of
  these goals might be similar to these

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• We are a non profit who relies on donations. We
  want to increase website traffic and improve the
  number and size of our online donations
• Our business relies on leads and we need our
  website to generate leads for us around the
  clock. It would be nice if it could also help us
  convert leads into customers.
• Our goal is to raise awareness and to communicate
  our mission. Our goal for our website is to
  better communicate our story and the why of our
  organization.
• We want to increase sales in our e-commerce store
  and we need a website that is designed to move
  website visitors into action, making it easy for
  them to purchase.

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• Whatever your goals may be, answering this
  question will impact every step of the design
  process, helping us to create a highly useful and
  effective website.
• 2) Who is your target audience?
• A critical piece of information that is needed
  prior to working on any website design project is
  to determine who your target audience (or
  audiences) is. It is important that the design
  of the website and the content is structured so
  that your visitors will take the actions that you
  want them to take.

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• One approach to this question is to create
  audience personas which are representations of
  the types of people you have identified as your
  target audiences. When creating an audience
  persona, ask yourself the following questions
  about each target audience
• What are their goals and desires? What is most
  important to them?
• Where do they get their news? What websites do
  they visit and what do they read?
• What is their typical age? Gender? Education
  level?
• Are your visitors technologically savvy? Are they
  early adopters?
• What social networks do your audiences typically
  use? Are they more likely to use Facebook?
  Twitter? LinkedIn?

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• Think about what you want each audience persona
  to learn or to believe about your company or
  organization.
• 3) Do you have great content?
• A well respected web standards guru named Jeffrey
  Zeldman is known for his statement that Content
  precedes design. Design in the absence of content
  is not design. Its decoration.

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• Thats a fancy way of saying content comes first.
  Design comes second. Often, our clients will
  come to us with a great idea of what they want
  their website design to look like without having
  any developed content. While we can work with
  this and can certainly attempt to achieve any
  style or design feel you may want, a better
  approach is to come to the table with what you
  want to say and how you want to say it, and
  usually the design will fall into place based on
  that content.
• Beyond just the words on the page, are there
  specific photographs you want to include? Are
  there videos that can help to tell your story?
  Are there any other elements you might like to
  include such as PDFs, webinars, e-books? Can we
  incorporate content from your social networks?

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• In their excellent book Made to Stick Why Some
  Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip and Dan Heath
  list six common features that lead to fantastic
  content for your website
• Simplicity Prioritize what ideas you want to
  get across. By trying to prioritize everything,
  nothing is a priority.
• Unexpectedness Use surprise to grab peoples
  attention.
• Concreteness Avoid speaking in abstractions.
• Credibility Is your content believable?
• Emotions Tap into emotion rather than just
  intellect.
• Stories We get people to act on our ideas by
  telling stories.

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• 4) Which keywords will help your website show up
  in Google search engine results?
• Want your website to show up 1 on Google? This
  wont happen by simple good luck or on accident
  its going to require some research, a strategy,
  and then a good bit of work. More on that later,
  but before you begin writing your web content, it
  is critical that we identify those keywords that
  your website needs to rank for in search engine
  results.

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• Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience
  (or audiences). What keywords or phrases would
  they actually type into Google if they were
  looking for a business or an organization like
  yours? Avoid insider language or jargon how
  would your target audience say it? Brainstorm a
  good list of keywords and phrases that you think
  would bring you the best or the right kind of
  website traffic (not necessarily the most). For
  example, if youre a law firm, optimizing your
  website for the keyword lawyer is basically
  pointless. That keyword brings back over 400
  million results. The odds of you making the
  front page for that search are essentially zero.
  But something more like family attorneys in
  Knoxville, TN will give you a much greater
  chance for success.

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• Once you have a basic keyword list, we can help
  with the research and an analysis of your
  competitors to ensure that the keywords you have
  chosen are the best choices.
• 5) What is your plan for the site after it
  launches?
• Often it can feel like as a website project wraps
  up and the website launches, we are crossing the
  finish line. I suppose in some ways that is true,
  but really the launch of your new website is the
  starting line. Once it has launched, do you have
  a plan for keeping the website up-to-date? There
  will be things to do after the site has launched.
  This may include

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• Creating and posting new blog articles or other
  new pieces of content
• Keeping an eye on analytics to track visitors
• Adding new customer testimonials
• Building inbound links from other websites
• Continued SEO work to improve Google search
  results

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• New Frame Creative is a full service website
  design / development and digital marketing agency
  in Knoxville, TN. We specialize in stylish
  modern website design, search engine
  optimization, graphic design, video production,
  and more. If you are looking for web design in
  Knoxville or SEO in Knoxville, visit us at
  http//www.newframecreative.com.