A website can help focus the company's strategic direction
There is something about creating a website that gets people excited about their company and its direction for the future. Maybe it's the fact that the website is out there for the world to see, and people want to get the message right. In any case, a website can be a great tool for bring people's ideas together and for focusing on what their business is really all about. Building your new website can help you change the way that everyone thinks about your company.
Websites are like proposals
Putting together a website can be a challenge, especially when your company has a very diverse set of capabilities and programs. For that reason, you may find it helpful to run website development efforts like proposal efforts. The challenge of putting together a website can to be met by setting the types of goals and objectives that are reminiscent of proposal efforts.
Here are a few reasons why developing a website is like writing a proposal.
- A website is a sales tool that uses limited content to capture the attention of diverse buying influences and lead them to the right actions.
- The website structure is critical to ensure that readers find the information that they need.
- Theme boxes and visuals can be used in a website to avoid having lots of words that nobody will ever read.
- A website development team may include people who are experts in their respective fields, but who may not have a lot of talent for writing.
- Website content generally gets developed by busy people who are expected to cover their regular, direct-charge jobs.
Unlike proposals, websites often don't get finished. In fact, many "new" websites never get past a bunch of half-written, recycled Word documents scattered around on a file server. This is usually because website development efforts aren't run with the same kind of schedule and budget constraints that drive proposal efforts. It's too easy for the development team to drift off track whenever something of higher priority comes up.
It's hard to write good content
You may want to focus on content first, because it is the most difficult component to produce. Using a proposal-like regiment for a website development team can help you produce content that is focused and well written.
- Develop benefit-oriented themes for website sections and pages.
- Select or create visuals with action-captions.
- Develop talking points that define the central ideas and benefits for each page.
- Write the content sparingly around the talking points.
- Edit content to produce a single voice and style.
With strong themes and visuals, you can keep the number of words to a minimum. The structured approach also helps avoid vacuous marketing slogans that often appear in sales documents.
The design is critical, but sometimes fatal
The design of the website conveys your image and, perhaps most importantly, directs attention to your message for various buying influences. Once the structure of the website is defined, the visual design can progress in parallel with the content development. However, it's important for the content developers to remain focused on the writing and to avoid getting distracted by design. Thinking about colors is always more fun than writing, but the design should be left to design professionals. Unfortunately, if writers start focusing on the design, the writing stops.
The final production of the website is fast
Once the content has been developed for each Web page, it can be placed immediately into a "wireframe" for the website. The wireframe is a design-neutral website that includes the basic navigation and allows the team to get a good feeling for how the content will flow online.
When the website design template is approved by the team, it can be integrated with the wireframe to produce the final website. This step is fairly straightforward and can happen very quickly. After complete checkout, the website can then be moved from a staging server to the final destination and made live.
Use focus groups to make sure your message comes across
Before you publish the website for the whole world to see, it's a good idea to use internal and external focus groups to give you a reading on its effectiveness. This is roughly equivalent to using a "red team" in a proposal effort. There is nothing like getting objective criticism from people who are not involved in the production process. Come up with some specific questions in advance to make sure that you get feedback in the areas that are most important to you. Use people within the company as well as people who don't know your business. The internal focus group will give you feedback on whether the website strikes a chord with your employees and whether it will be effective in supporting your strategic plan. The external focus group will give you a good sense of how clients and prospects will view your website.
Don't forget website updates and business intelligence
You should consider using the following tools to get the most out of the investment in your website.
Content Management System
One of the biggest problems with websites is keeping them up-to-date as your business changes. With a content manager, you can edit easily edit text in a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface and publish it to the website, without doing any programming. This allows you to keep your content fresh and make sure that your message is always on target.
Your website offers a unique opportunity to gather and take action on business intelligence. After you've launched your site, you'll want to know whether it's attracting the people you want to reach and what those people are reading. Moreover, you'll want to have this information at your fingertips with in an easy-to-use online dashboard. A traffic analysis system not only tracks website usage, but it provides a connection or correlation between website tracking data and the goals of your business. Without this, you'll be missing the opportunity to leverage your website fully in your sales and marketing efforts.
