Recently DBG was lucky enough to present to a small group of business owners as part of the Brand Task Force.

The presentation was aimed at giving businesses a quick digital health check. DBG chose to present on ‘5 Tips For Getting a Great Website’, and in this 5 part blog series we’ll cover off on the information we presented.

Part one outlines why you need a plan for your website, and the sorts of things that you need to include in your plan.

1. Have a Plan

Just like you would write up a business plan for a new venture, we’d recommend sitting down and coming up with a website plan.

Why is a plan important? It sets out your direction! And a good plan gives any project a solid foundation to work from.

Ensure that this plan ties in neatly with your marketing plan, it should not sit in isolation. In fact, a website plan should be a critical part of your marketing plan!

Here are the sorts of things you could include in your plan:

Ask yourself why you want a new website? e.g. To supplement offline marketing activities?
What is the purpose of this new website? e.g. Is it to attract new customers, or act as a community portal?
What do you want to achieve from the new website? e.g. Set a number of leads you would like to receive via the website.
Take a look at your competition who have websites: what are they doing well, and what are they not doing well?
What are other websites out there that you like the look of?
Who are your target audience? (more on this in the next installment!)

We’d also recommend creating a website wish list. You wish list should include the wants and needs for your new project.

What are the things that you must have on your website – for example it must have a CMS so you can manage content and it must be mobile-friendly – versus what you want on your website. This ‘want’ list may form part of a longer-term strategy for the ongoing scaling of your website.

Stay tuned for part two in this series which will cover the valuable activity of identifying your target audience.