Planning Your Site: Why Bother Planning?

The Importance of Planning
Building a website is not unlike building your home. First you must decide the fundamentals of the home such as what features you want, where it will be located, how much you can afford, how you want the floor plans laid out, when you want to move in by, what building materials you will use, and what additional features you might want to add in the future. Next, comes the building stage where developers build the home and put in the electrical circuitry and plumbing. Finally, when the foundations are built and working, you pick out the stylistic elements such as tiling, paint color, and wall paper.

When most small businesses think of building a website, they immediately jump to the stylistic elements and design, bypassing the planning aspects and the basics of how it will work. After all, there are so many websites out there, they figure they can just mimic what everyone else does and have a successful site.

The problem is in the term “successful.” Most businesses have sites that act as online brochures, usually because companies take their marketing materials, break them into sections, and post the content online. To them, “successful” means they now have the barebones minimum of a website.

Unfortunately, sites like this add virtually nothing to your marketing mix. If you want your site to generate leads or sales, you have to take a step back and plan the steps it will take to get visitors to take a particular action – like joining your newsletter, downloading a guide, or scheduling a consultation.

It’s Not You, It’s Me
To say it bluntly, most people won’t come to your site to learn about you. When they first come to your site, they are usually trying to accomplish something – whether that is researching a topic or trying to buy something. They’ve probably just typed a couple of keywords into Google or Yahoo and your site popped up in the results. They click on the link and now they want reassurance that your site is relevant to their search. If it’s not – that is, it only talks about you and your company and what you do – they will click away.

See, people don’t care about you. They care about themselves, their problems, and their time. They care about finding the results they are looking for. And they have control over how long they spend on your page and how much of your content they read.

For instance, if someone is looking for information on buying a digital camera, they may want to know what’s currently available, which cameras get the best customer ratings, what features they need to best photograph their son’s soccer game, will the camera easily fit in their purse, etc. If they end up on your page, which has nothing to do with their questions, chances are, they will leave. A handful might click on another of your pages in hopes of finding the information they want, but if they don’t find it on the second page, you’ve lost about 95% of your traffic.

What about the people that see your URL on your marketing materials and visit your site? They, too, have questions and are trying to gather information about who you are, what you do, and if it’s relevant to them. That third point is the most important. If your site’s content doesn’t answer their questions or seem relevant to them, they won’t bother contacting you.

And that’s why planning your site is important. You want to determine up front the types of people you’d like to attract and would be ideal candidates for you to work with. You want to understand what information they are looking for to help them make a decision. And you want to tell them what the next step is and how they can take action to move forward to solve their problem.

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