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A specified website? Have you determined what your website is for and what that means for its design?

I see a lot of company websites that seem rather "me too".

It is not clear why many companies decide to have a website and I can only imagine that in some cases it was because everyone else had one.

In fact in selling my web development services one managing director recently told me this was the reason he had a site built and further that he did not expect to get any results from it, he just wanted to have one, it seemed rather like a membership of the golf club or having the fashionable company car. Incidentally he was wise not to have expectations of getting any results, because the website in question was content and I would guess, therefore, visitor free!

If your company decides to have a website, you might decide what it is for?

Is it for :

communicating a corporate image to your shareholders
presenting news and company information to a wide external audience
communicating with your extended workforce
helping new recruits find out about your organisation
selling or enabling greater sales of products
maintaining loyalty among existing customers
educating a customer base about a technical product
assisting customers with product choice on-line
delivering product information and support data to your customer base
connecting customers to their nearest point of purchase easily
giving on-line registration facilities to qualify for extended warranties
making it easy for customers to place orders on-line
allowing customers to review order status on-line
encouraging potential customers to search for suitable replacements to competitor items
establishing competitive bids for supplies to your organisation
getting improved supply chain options through a registration program

(this is not an exhaustive list)

Starting to specify your goals or objectives for your on-line presence will start to define the type and style of website you need.

It is possible to want many or all the above types of objectives and more but each objective starts to define how part of your website needs to be made.

If no one is ever likely to print out pages from your website you can go graphic in a big way, using graphic images as navigation aids is common but many sites make such use of graphics they could empty a colour printer cartridge with a few pages!

If you plan to deliver product information, this will probably need to include printable materials, which rules out deep colour backgrounds and can limit HTML page layout for printer paper size reasons.

To deliver product support data you may develop application stories with interactive fault finding or FAQ (frequently asked questions) areas. You may wish to have an on-line forum in which your technical staff can reply to technical questions so that other customers can browse this before posting their queries in. This could be in the public area or in a password access area.

To connect customers to their nearest point of purchase you may need a range of options, maps, Zip or Post code searched databases or pages listing outlets. You may want on-line forms to fax or email an enquiry to a specific or a number of outlets with copies to the appropriate factory.

To educate a market about a technical product you may need technical articles or a glossary of terms, perhaps on-line copies of technical papers presented to conferences.

If you want to conduct on-line commerce, your server requirements will become more specific.

For customers to register their details you may have to safeguard their data if it is to remain on your server.

For customers to review order status on-line there will need to be a regular update of server databases or you may have to run your own web server in house with suitable staff to administer it.

If you want to target new recruits you might develop reciprocal links with suitable Universities.

Defining or specifying the objectives for your website is the first step in the design process, the next is starting to look at your target visitors and starting to specify how they will be visiting your website, for example: on which page will they enter, where or how will they find your site, what browsers will they be using, what screen resolutions, what colour density will they be able to see, how fast will their Internet connections be, what will their primary language be?

In my humble opinion "because everyone else has one" is not an adequate objective for, or reason to get, a company website!

Author Mark Abraham (mark@sticky-marketing.net) 28 June 2001