Planning Your Site With Sticky Notes
Planning your website can be easy. Many people find that visualizing a web site is a challenge, but I have used a simple strategy for years that seems to solve the problem.
The method is very simple. Get yourself a pad of sticky notes and use one sticky note for each page on your planned website. literally post your website on the wall in front of you and rearrange it as you think about your content.
What this will end up looking like is an organizational chart. See the example on the right as you read this.
Begin at the beginning. Think of your web site as posing questions, and providing answers. These questions and answers are about your product, and any other material that advances your likelihood of making a sale.
You are literally educating your prospects about your product, how to think about it, and how you deliver it. This is about justifying your unique competitive advantage. You are clarifying and meeting needs. Selling is not about clever trickery, it is about understanding the needs of your target customers, and explaining the benefits of your product in terms of the customers needs.
Think about the journey of visitors through your web site. How do you direct them from page to page, from topic to topic, to make the sale? What must they know and understand before they will buy from you? How is your product superior to your competition? Does your website explain your competitive advantage?
You get the idea. This is educational and about matching customer needs with your services.
What Else?
Let's step back and talk about the 5 stages of the marketing cycle (listed below):
lead development
qualification of your prospect
closing the sale
service after the sale
strategies to create repeat business
Next we need to think about how your web site relates to the parts of the marketing cycle. Really, we need to expand the discussion to all the Internet tools. (later) This is a good news, bad news discussion. The bad news is that the web can't do it all for you, nor can the Internet do it all. Why bring this up now?
It is time to think more carefully about web site design. The focus here is on here is "content design", not "graphic design". Most people confuse the later for the former, and while they are related, one is the "message", the other the "medium". This content, and these messages, must always fit somewhere in 5 stages of the marketing cycle. Thinking carefully in terms of these five steps will help you understand how to organize your website, and probably it will help you understand everything you do in marketing your business.
Your website and other Internet strategies must relate tightly to your overall marketing strategy or they are a waste of time. Most of us don't have enough time as it is with our small businesses. We need to be very clear on what we are trying to do, so that we know if we are doing it. Oddly, people get websites on the faith that they are the magic bullet without ever getting clear on what they do.
Planning your website can be easy. Many people find that visualizing a web site is a challenge, but I have used a simple strategy for years that seems to solve the problem.
The method is very simple. Get yourself a pad of sticky notes and use one sticky note for each page on your planned website. literally post your website on the wall in front of you and rearrange it as you think about your content.
What this will end up looking like is an organizational chart. See the example on the right as you read this.
Begin at the beginning. Think of your web site as posing questions, and providing answers. These questions and answers are about your product, and any other material that advances your likelihood of making a sale.
You are literally educating your prospects about your product, how to think about it, and how you deliver it. This is about justifying your unique competitive advantage. You are clarifying and meeting needs. Selling is not about clever trickery, it is about understanding the needs of your target customers, and explaining the benefits of your product in terms of the customers needs.
Think about the journey of visitors through your web site. How do you direct them from page to page, from topic to topic, to make the sale? What must they know and understand before they will buy from you? How is your product superior to your competition? Does your website explain your competitive advantage?
You get the idea. This is educational and about matching customer needs with your services.
What Else?
Let's step back and talk about the 5 stages of the marketing cycle (listed below):
lead development
qualification of your prospect
closing the sale
service after the sale
strategies to create repeat business
Next we need to think about how your web site relates to the parts of the marketing cycle. Really, we need to expand the discussion to all the Internet tools. (later) This is a good news, bad news discussion. The bad news is that the web can't do it all for you, nor can the Internet do it all. Why bring this up now?
It is time to think more carefully about web site design. The focus here is on here is "content design", not "graphic design". Most people confuse the later for the former, and while they are related, one is the "message", the other the "medium". This content, and these messages, must always fit somewhere in 5 stages of the marketing cycle. Thinking carefully in terms of these five steps will help you understand how to organize your website, and probably it will help you understand everything you do in marketing your business.
Your website and other Internet strategies must relate tightly to your overall marketing strategy or they are a waste of time. Most of us don't have enough time as it is with our small businesses. We need to be very clear on what we are trying to do, so that we know if we are doing it. Oddly, people get websites on the faith that they are the magic bullet without ever getting clear on what they do.
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