For a website to fulfill its function it will not hurt for a company or organization to try to ask themselves some questions.
Objectives and target
- Why do we need a website? Information, marketing, contact with customers...
- What is our primary target audience? Age, geography, interests...
- Why should the audience want to visit our homepage?
- Why should the audience want to come back to the homepage?
Competition
- Who are our competitors?
- Why should our target audience prefer our website instead of our competitors'?
- In what are our competitors better than us?
- In what are we better than our competitors?
Contents
- What type of information do we believe that our visitors are looking for?
- What type of information do people usually ask us about?
- How do we get the content we want to the website?
Design
- What feelings do we want to convey with our website?
- Do we have today a corporate image (logo, fonts, colors, images, etc.) that should be reflected on our homepage?
- Do we have a domain name (e.g. company.com) which we want to use? If not, is it going to be related to the name of the company or organization? Is it available?
- Can we list some sites that we like? Why do we like them?
- Can we list some sites that we dislike? Why do we dislike them?
Marketing
- How do we promote our site?
- Do we need (advanced) search engine optimization?
- Should we make use of social media (blogs, etc.)?
Project related
- What budget do we have?
- What deadline do we have?