Developing and Maintaining a Successful Website

Here are some questions to ask yourself when developing and maintaining a new website:

1. What are my goals for the site?
It’s important to know why you’re building the site. Is it for sales or marketing? Is it a tool for communication or an online brochure? Do you want to sell products through the site, or just educate consumers about them? Do you want to increase membership in your organization, or offer Web-based benefits to current members? Do you want visitors to email you? Call you? Subscribe to a newsletter? Knowing your goals will help focus your ideas for the site.

2. What am I trying to sell or promote?
Even if you don’t like the idea of selling yourself, it’s what we all do, every day, if we want to be successful. Don’t be afraid of sales and marketing. Finding the answer to this question will determine what are the most important themes of the site, what to name the buttons, and the tone to use when writing the content.

3. What are the components to getting a website up and running?

• Design & Development: The architecture of the site needs to be built. An appropriate look and feel must be designed. The copy needs to be written and any additional tools such as online forms, shopping carts and audio clips need to be added.
• Hosting: Just as you might rent office space, your Web site needs to be hosted somewhere so people can reach it.
• Upkeep: Once live, a good site continues to post fresh material, giving people a reason to return.

4. What content do I need to build the site?
First, create an outline around the themes you want to promote. Second, remember that each line of the outline is a page that needs content, text and images that will help educate your visitors. The images may include a logo or photos of people or products. Poor quality photos or bad clip art can make the most attractive site look amateurish; sometimes no photos can be better than poor ones.

5. What are my responsibilities to create an effective site?
Your input is essential since no one knows your business as well as you do. Before you hire a developer you should review their portfolio and ask for referrals. You should expect to help develop a site outline with your developer, pull the copy together and give input on the layouts presented to you. Once your site is live you should also budget time to add content on a regular basis.