Planning Your Web Site 11

Planning Your Web Site 11
For each and every one of your target markets, you should also try
to determine an appropriate “WOW” factor. What can you provide for
them on your Web site that will WOW them? Your objective should be
to exceed the target market’s expectations.
Your main target market might be your potential customer, but other
target markets might include existing customers, or the media, or those
who influence the buying decision for your potential customers, associates,
or affiliates.
When you look at—really look at—potential customers versus existing
customers, you realize that what these two groups want and need
from your Web site are probably different. Someone who is an existing
customer knows your company. Your products, your business practices,
and the like are not a priority for them on your site. A potential customer
needs these things before giving you their first order. “Customer”
is such a huge target market; it needs to be broken down into segments.
Every business is different. If you were a hotel, for example, your customer
target market might be broken down further into:
• Business travelers
• Vacation travelers
• Family travelers
• Meeting planners
• Handicapped travelers
• Tour operators
• Groups.
You get the idea. You need to segment your customer target market
and then, for each segment, you need to do an analysis of needs, wants,
and expectations. If the media is part of your target market, make sure
you plan to have a media center or if you want to reach potential investors,
make sure you have an investor relations page.
If you intend to market children’s products, your Web site should be
colorful and the text simple and easy to understand in keeping with
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what appeals to your target market. Chances are, fun-looking graphics
will be used extensively on your site to draw children further into it (see
Figure 1.1). If you market financial services, your Web site requires a
more professional approach. Your graphics must convey a clean appearance,
and the text should be informative and written in a businesslike
fashion (see Figure 1.2). As this example demonstrates, the content
and tone of your site must be tailored to your target market. After all,
this is the best way to attract the attention of the people who are interested
in purchasing your product or service.
Another aspect to consider when designing your Web site is your
target market’s propensity to utilize the latest technologies and the configuration
they are likely to be using. An online business that markets
custom, streaming multimedia presentations expects its clientele to be
technically inclined. These clients are more likely to have the latest software,
advanced Web browser technologies, and faster machines.
On the other hand, clients of a vendor who sells gardening supplies
online might be less likely to have fully embraced the latest technolo-
Figure 1.1. Web sites designed to appeal to children include fun, colorful
images.
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Planning Your Web Site 13
gies. Most people looking for these products are connecting from home
rather than from their workplace. They might have a slow dial-up connection
to the Internet, slower machines, and older software. They might
still be using the Web browser that was originally installed on their
system, simply because they are uncomfortable downloading the latest
version of the browser, are unaware of the more recent version, or are
uninterested in downloading a large file. If your target market includes
this demographic, be careful with your use of Java, Flash, and large
graphic files.
What does this mean for developing and designing your Web site?
Well, streaming multimedia developers can design their Web sites with
more graphics and dynamic multimedia effects because their clients expect
to be impressed when they visit the developer’s site. If vendors of
gardening supplies designed their sites similarly, many of their clients
might be alienated because the site would be too slow to load. They
might take their business elsewhere. The gardening supplies site requires
Figure 1.2. A business-oriented site incorporates informative text and a clean,
magazine style layout.
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a more basic design with less concentration on large graphics and multimedia
effects and more focus on presenting information.
Products and Services
It is important to define the products and services you want to promote
on-line. Sometimes the products and services you offer off-line in your
physical store are the same as in your online store, but quite often there
are differences.
Business owners who have a bricks-and-mortar location sometimes
assume that their online storefront is an extension of their offline storefront
and that they will provide exactly the same products and services
online as offline. In some cases, fewer products are offered on-line than
in the physical store. This is often the case if you are test marketing, but
also if some of the products you sell in your physical location are not
appropriate for online sales because of competitive pricing or shipping
logistics.
In other cases, your online store might offer more products or services
than the bricks-and-mortar location. For example, your offline
bookstore might not offer shipping or gift wrapping. If your online bookstore
does not offer these services, you will lose a lot of business to your
online competition. When a site’s product offerings include items that
are appropriate for gift giving, it is essential to also offer wrapping,
customized cards, shipping to multiple addresses, and shipping options.
The consumer is “king” and is very demanding. You have to meet and
beat your consumers’ expectations online to garner market share. People
shopping for gifts online are looking for convenience, and the site that
provides the greatest convenience and the greatest products at the lowest
prices will be the winner.
Web sites and Internet marketing strategies differ depending on
the product or service being sold. A company that markets toys has to
develop a fun and interactive Web site that is attractive to children.
The Web site should also give children a way to tell their friends about
the site as well as a reason to return to the site. The toy company
might want to offer an electronic postcard service whereby children
can send a colorful and musical message to their friends and tell them
about the site.
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Planning Your Web Site 15
Another idea is to provide a “wish list” service. Children can make
a list of the toys they want, and this list is sent to the parents via e-mail.
The parents can then make better informed purchasing decisions and
might become loyal to the toy company’s site. Likewise, some toy companies
offer reminder services that send an e-mail message to visitors
who have registered and completed the appropriate questionnaire to
remind them of a child’s birthday and to offer suggestions for gift ideas.
Once again, this promotes sales and repeat traffic and increases customer
loyalty.
In another example, a software development company might want
to provide downloadable demo versions of its software products and
allow people to review its products for a specified period of time before
they make a purchasing decision. When consumers decide to buy
the software, a robust e-commerce system needs to be in place to handle
the orders.
A travel agency’s Web site might include features such as an opt-in
mailing list to send people information on weekly vacation specials or a
page on the site detailing the latest specials. The travel agency’s site
might also want to include downloadable or streaming video tours of
vacation resorts to entice visitors to buy resort vacation packages. Another
idea is to have a system in place to help customers book vacations,
rent cars, and check for available flights. The travel agency might
also want to store customer profiles so they can track where particular
customers like to sit on the plane, the type of hotel room they usually
book, and their credit card information to make bookings more efficient
for the customer and the agency.
If you are marketing a service online, it is difficult to visually depict
what your service is all about. Visitors to your site need some reassurance
that the service you are selling them is legitimate and valuable.
Therefore, you might wish to include a page on your site that lists testimonials
from well-known customers. This gives prospective customers
more confidence about purchasing your service.
The Fundamentals
Once you have clearly defined your online objectives, your target markets,
and the products and/or services you want to promote online, you
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are ready to move on to the next phase of planning your Web site—
doing your competitve analysis.
Using Competitor Sites to Your Advantage
One of your Web site’s objectives is to always meet and beat the competition
in terms of search engine rankings and Web site content. To do so,
you must understand exactly what it is your competition is doing. Take
the time to research competitors and compare them on an element-byelement
basis.
There are a number of ways you can identify your competition online.
You can find your competition by conducting searches with the appropriate
keywords, seeing which competing Web sites rank highly in the
major search engines and directories. Similarly, there are many other
resources online you can use to research your competition, including
industry-specific Web portals and directories.
Once you have gathered a list of competing Web sites, analyze them
element by element to determine which Web elements your competitors
include on their sites and how their sites compare to one another. You
want to look at what types of content they are providing to your target
market. Other components you should analyze include the visual appeal
of your competitors’ sites, content, ease of navigation, search engine
friendliness, interactivity, and Web site stickiness, or what they do
to keep people on their site. This information can provide you with
details on what you need to incorporate into your site to meet and beat
the competition.
You have to realize that your online competition is different from
your offline competition. Online you are competing with all organizations
that have an online presence and sell the same products and services
you do. When doing your competitive analysis online, you want
to select the “best of breed”—those fantastic Web sites of organizations
selling the same products and/or services you do—no matter where they
are physically located.
When we do competitive analysis for clients, we reverse engineer or
dissect the competing Web site from a number of different perspectives.
Generally, you will choose five or six of the absolute best competing Web
sites. Then you start to build a database using Excel or a table in Word.
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Planning Your Web Site 17
Start with the first competing Web site and from your review start
to add database elements to the first column. Note any types of content,
target markets defined, repeat traffic techniques used, viral marketing
techniques used, search engine friendliness features used (you’ll get these
in Chapter 6), download time for different types of Internet connections,
cross-platform compatibility, cross-browser compatibility, innovative
elements, etc. When you have dissected the first competing Web
site and have noted appropriate database elements for comparative purposes,
move on to the second competing Web site. Go through the same
process, but adding only different or new elements to what you already
have in your database. Continue building the first column of your database
by continuing through all the sites you want to include in your
competitive analysis.
The next step is to develop a column for each of the sites you want
to include in the competitive analysis. Add two more columns—one for
your existing Web site to see how your site stacks against the competition
and the second for future planning purposes.
The next step is to go back and compare each site against the criteria
for column one, noting appropriate comments. For content information
you want to note whether the particular site has the specific
content and how well it was presented. For download speeds note specific
minute and seconds for each type of connection. Tools to help you
with this element can be found at:
• BizLand Download Time Checker (http://www.bizland.com/
product/sitedoctor.html)
• Calculate Download Times (http://www.sercomm.net/
download.htm).
For each repeat traffic generator, you may choose to include details
or just Yes/No. Continue with this process until you have completed the
database, including your own existing site.
By this time you should have a good feel for the users’ experience
when they visit your competitors’ sites. Now you are ready to do your
planning. In the last column of your database, review each of the elements
in the first column, review your notes in your competitive analysis,
and where appropriate, complete the last column by categorizing
each of the elements as one of the following:
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• A—Need to have; essential, critical element; can’t live without
• B—Nice to have if it doesn’t cost too much
• C—Don’t need; don’t want at any price.
Now you have done your competitive analysis. Having completed
your identification of your objectives, target markets, products and services,
and your competitive analysis, you are ready to develop your
storyboard or architectural plan or blueprint for your site.
Storyboarding Your Web Site
Next you are ready to visualize and plan your Web site—integrate your
objectives, your target market information, the findings of the competitive
analysis, and your own ideas as well as those of others. This is done
through the process of storyboarding. The storyboard is the foundation
of your Web site. Consider it the architectural plan or blueprint of your
site. It should show you, on paper, the first draft of the content and
layout of your site. It gives you the chance to review the layout and
make changes before development begins.
Figure 1.3. A sample layout of a home page and the main site components.
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Planning Your Web Site 19
A Web site storyboard can be thought of much like a hierarchical
organizational chart in a business. In a typical business structure, the
executives sit on top, followed by their subordinates, and so on. Figures
1.3 and 1.4 are examples of two modified sections of a storyboard layout
developed by our office for a client prior to building a Web site.
Think of your Web site storyboard like this: You begin with your main
page or home page at the top. Under the main page you have your
central navigation bar. Each of the navigation options should be available
on each page, regardless of where the user is on your site. Within
each of the sections listed on your main navigation bar, you’re going to
have subsections, and so on.
The storyboard can be created with a software program, with sheets
of paper, or with any other mechanism. Quite often when we are starting
out we’ll start with yellow sticky notes on a wall. Very low tech, but
it works! It is very easy to get a visual of the navigation structure and
easy to fill in the content pages (one per sticky note) in the appropriate
Figure 1.4. A sample layout of a subsection and the details included within.
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20 101 Ways To Promote Your Web Site
places. It is also very easy to edit—simply move a sticky from one section
to another or add another sticky note for a new page.
Once your first draft is done, you need to go back and review the
proposed Web site against each and every one of your objectives, each
and every one of your target markets (needs, wants, expectations, WOW
factor), and each and every one of your products and services. You need
to review the proposed Web site from the competitive analysis viewpoint.
Have you included all the must-haves and left an opportunity for
the elements that fit into the would-be-nice category? Will the proposed
Web site beat the competition? Review the proposed site with your stakeholders
and a few members of your target market. Get feedback from
your various target markets and fine-tune the blueprint until you’ve got
it right. It is easy (and cheap) at this stage to add new content and
change the layout.
When developing your storyboard, remember to keep the layout of
your site simple and logical, as this is how it will be laid out for users
once the site is completed. Do not move forward with the Web development
process until you have finalized the layout of the storyboard, ensuring
that the site will be easy for your target audience to use and that
it provides all the elements you need to achieve your objectives. Review
your storyboard to ensure that all of the target markets have been addressed.
If you want to address the media, be sure to include a Media
Center. If you want to attract potential investors, be sure to include a
comprehensive Investor Relations section. Give consideration to viral
and permission marketing elements that can be included on your site
and where they can best be positioned. We discuss these elements in
depth in later chapters.
Once you have the completed and approved storyboard, it becomes
the blueprint for construction of your site. You are now ready to move
on to the actual construction. The next chapter discusses some of the
content and design elements of your site.
Internet Resources for Chapter 1
I have included a few resources for you to check out regarding planning
your Web site. For additional resources on this and a variety of other
Internet marketing topics, visit the Resources section of my Web site at
http://www.susansweeney.com/resources.html. There you can find additional
tips, tools, techniques, and resources.