creating a web site - a virtual strategy?

By Ruth Tearle

Creating a website is a strategic planning exercise. In trying to decide what your website should look like, you need to think about every aspect of your business both now, and in the future. In effect, by designing your own website, you are developing a vision of your future business.

HOW TO CREATE YOUR OWN WEBSITE.

Like any strategic plan, developing a website involves three major steps

Develop a vision of your ideal website.
Plan to implement your vision.
Implement and monitor results.

DEVELOP A VISION OF YOUR FUTURE WEBSITE

This involves answering questions such as:

Stakeholder analysis. Who are the stakeholders of my website? What would they expect from the website? What would attract them to visit my website regularly?
Benchmarking against the world's best companies. Surf the internet. Look at websites of the world's best companies. Ask people in your network to refer you to their favourite websites. Which websites do you like best and why? Which websites irritate you and why? Therefore what are the key success factors for a website for your type of business?
Trends and opportunities. How are world class companies using e-commerce to benefit their businesses? (See article on e-commerce) What opportunities do these trends create for your business? Therefore what do you want to use your website for?
Competitor analysis. Do a search on the web for anyone involved in a similar business to yours. What do you like, and what don't you like about their websites?
Competitive advantage. Why should someone look at your website rather than the millions available on-line? How will you attract people to your website?
Internal analysis.

Information & research. What information do you already have in brochures, newsletters, advertisements, articles, reports, or in your head that you could put onto your website? What information do you have on your computers, that is a by product of your business? What information do you generate regularly for customers that could save you time if it were on your website? What research do you do that could be of value to your stakeholders?

Products and services. What products and services do you currently offer? How can e-commerce help you to turn products into services and services into products?

Distribution. How do you currently distribute your products and services? Which products/services could be distributed electronically? What other functions could be done via the net?

Marketing and promotion. How can you use your site to market your business? How will you promote your website? How will you make people aware of your website?

Alliances. Who should you link your site to? Who could you form joint ventures with? How will you network with others so as to direct traffic to your site?

Finance. Which products/services will you provide for free? Which products and services will you charge for? Will orders be processed on line? How will you get the money in?

People/skills. What skills will you need to manage the creation, sales and distribution of your on-line products and services? What skills will you need to to create and maintain your website? Which skills will you develop in house? Which will you outsource?

Image. What image do you want your website to reflect?

Key success factors. Summarise all your ideas so far. What criteria must your website meet for it to be acceptable to you?

Vision. Develop a vision of your company's website in 2004 in a creative group activity. Get a group together to design the home page of your website on a piece of cardboard. Then get sub teams to design each linking page down to a maximum of three levels. Try to be as creative as possible.

PLAN TO IMPLEMENT YOUR VISION

Once you've developed your vision, you can choose between:

Hiring a professional web designer to develop your site.
Design your site yourself.

Should you choose to design your site yourself, you will need to:

Choose the software. There are a number of web design software packages on the market. e.g. FrontPage 2000 and Dreamweaver. Web design magazines such as .net provide information about all the packages available.
Choose a hosting company. Once again there are millions of hosting companies all over the world who would love to host your site. Check critically what each hosting company offers you in terms of on-line support, statistics and compatibility to the software you've chosen. Sites such as http://www.frontpageworld.com/ will have lists of hosting companies. Remember the statistics generated by your host company can be a useful way for you to monitor the effectiveness of your site. This is something worth paying for!
Register a domain. Your host company will normally do this for you. Otherwise in SA, you could contact http://co.za
Learn to use the software you've chosen. Software such as Frontpage 2000 is like a sophisticated word processor. Depending on your confidence with computers, you could either simply experiment with the software, or choose to go on a training course.
Design the layout of your website. Design an overall layout for your entire website and create a template. This ensures that every page of your website has a consistent feel.
Create your website. Cut and paste the documents you created when you developed your vision, onto your templates.
Publish your website. Depending on the software and the host company you've chosen, this can be as easy as pressing a key 'publish' or it may require knowledge on how to ftp. (Simple programmes such as cute ftp are available on the internet or on CD-Rom obtainable free with magazines such as .net.)
Link your website to search engines and to related websites. To list your site on the 12 most popular search engines use a short cut provided by http://www.addengine.com. Also email sites similar to yours and offer to exchange links with them.
Promote your own website. Put your URL (website address) onto printed items such as business cards, stationary, emails and pamphlets. Tell all your customers, suppliers and networks about your website. Use every opportunity to promote your URL.

IMPLEMENT AND MONITOR RESULTS.

Track your website traffic. Use your service providers statistics to track the traffic to your website. e.g. look at when people visit your website, which search engines direct them to you, which pages they visit and how long they spend on each page. Then consider what sales you've had as a result of your website. Use this information to continually monitor and upgrade your site.

Developing your own website
can be one of the most creative, strategic exercises you can do for your business.

This site was created by the author using Frontpage 2000.

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