Planning Your System

Our Business

• What are the critical success factors for your business?
  How should your web site contribute to achieving those objectives?
  
• Who is your audience?
  Is there just one audience or are there several? Why will they visit your site and what do they expect to gain from their visit?
  
• What image do you want your Web Site to convey? If you had to reduce the whole impression of your site to a one-line message, what would it be?
• What graphic elements (such as colors, fonts, logos, or slogans)
  from your print media do you want to incorporate into your web
  site?
  
• What site is most like the site you want? What do you like most about that site? What do you want your site to do better?

Goals

• Public Relations, Corporate Presence
  Publish basic information about who we are, what we sell, where we do business, and how to find us.
• Sales Support
  
  • Educate customers, by providing background information.
  • Present product offerings
  • Provide a search capability to help the customer find product information quickly.
  • Present detailed product information, and technical specifications.
• Smart Sales Support
  
  • Generate inquires and refer them to appropriate members of our marketing staff.
  • Notify customers of new products and services via e-mail.
  • Publish news via RSS (Real Simple Syndication).
  • Solicit customer feedback via e-mail.
  • Solicit structured customer feedback via forms.
  • Build a customer community by providing a list server facility (Discussion Forms and Topics).
• Customer Service
  Which of the following features would you like your site to provide?
  • Frequently Asked Questions.
  • Problem reporting.
  • Sell access to a private (members-only) section of the site
  • Sell information packages (e.g., standards, images, newsletters, database lookups, reports, etc.)
  • Sell products from a catalog
  • Register customers for classes or events
  • Help the customer configure product or service options.
  • Gather customer profile a data and use customer preference information to inform customers of new product offerings or sales.
  • Cross-sell products and services, that is, sell auxiliary products that are complementary to a particular purchase.
  • Do follow-up cross selling, that is, contact customers and suggest replacement, maintenance, or service options for previous purchases.
  • Do affinity selling (suggest products to customers based on their preferences or past buying patterns).

Objectives

• Total Number of visits per month.
• Number of visits per month to certain information pages; each
  visit to one of these pages counts as a cost effective alternative
  to a telephone call.
• Number of people who register to receive product updates.
• Number of people who signup for premium, "members only"
  services.
• Monthly dollar volume of subscriptions.
• The number of leads generated per month.
• Monthly sales volume.
• Number of sale per month of selected, complex products that usually have a very high cost of sales.
• Average transaction size.
  

Scope

• How long do you anticipate using this site without a major
  renovation that would give it an entirely new look?
• How frequently do you anticipate adding a new button or category of
  information on your site?
• How frequently do you anticipate adding, deleting, or changing the information on your site?