Since we’ve got a site, there must be a reason for its existence . . right? We bothered to put something up – there must be a point. But often many sites don’t consciously know why they created their sites in the first place, and this may be a result of not taking the time to articulate the goals of the site – its raison d’être.
By mapping out your goals, you’ll find it much easier to translate them into things to look at to make sure that you’re achieving your goals. These “things to look at” are also called metrics. AKA KPIs. AKA all those other silly names that denote some sort of accountability. At any rate, it turns out that wachingwebsites.com’s goals are pretty simple. In no particular order:
- Create a cool site that supports the book well. This includes information about the book, its chapters, changes, updates and so on.
- Inform people about our services. Tell them about the company “Watching Websites”, and let them know what we do.
- Blog about things related to our areas of expertise. Anything goes: industry trends, anecdotes, lessons learned; as long as we provide content that our readers think is valuable, we’ll have a great start.
- Encourage visitors to stick around by providing free resources (including presentations, whitepapers, notable conference lists, etc)
- Be full of win.
Your goals are undoubtedly different. Example might be “increase retention by 10%”, “party like its 1980″, “increase conversions next quarter by 1%”, “increase blog readership by 2%”, “wear cool shirts”, “increase bottom line by 25% over 2 quarters”, etc.
We’ll come back to these goals, over and over and over again during the course of this series of blog posts. Knowing what your goals are can help you save you alot of time, by painting a clear vision of where you’ll likely want to end up. Now that i’ve got these four things to work with, off I go to create sketches of what I envision! baseline the site to figure out how it’s doing first! (woops, jumped the gun!).
This is an article in a series of blog posts that will look at the process of building the new Watching Websites website, focusing on metrics & analytics. The posts include:
Part 1: things as is aren’t looking so good
Part 2: goals? what goals?
Part 3: baselining the existing site
Part 4: mocking up the new site
Part 5: marketing requirements documents (MRD) made easy
Part 6: requirements definitions documents (RDD) made easy
Part 7: analytics requirements documents (ARD) made easy
Part 8: choosing the right platform
Part 9: watching websites – the back end
Part 10: watching websites – the front end
Part 11: watching websites – going live!
Part 12: post-upgrade analytics in practice
Part 13: optimizing the site
Part 14: lessons learned & conclusions
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