Regardless of your website project, it’s crucial to consider several factors to avoid ending up having a seemingly non-existent website. For one, your website needs careful planning to set the right goals and implement a versatile, fast, targeted, user-friendly, informative, and scalable website architecture.
From the basic web design to the content, you want an impressive and functional website that is visible in the first few pages of search engine results pages. Therefore, it’s important to know the right strategies and tools to use—like a visual sitemap generator—to make your project plan flawless.
In this article, you’ll learn how to optimize your website project plan to help reach your business goals.
- Set Goals
The first step in optimizing your website project plan is to set goals.
Before, people often use the waterfall model when goal setting. For example, you list things you want to achieve and hit them in a linear fashion. Once you hit the first goal, you’re off to the second one, and so forth.
Nowadays, more people find it better to utilize agile instead. Compared to the waterfall method, agile pushes you to become more versatile with your approach. With agile, you can set goals in different ways. Here are some of them:
- Set and focus on hitting a high purpose goal. For example, your team doesn’t need to think about meeting any metric while building your site as long as the result will be a beautifully designed high-traffic website.
- You can analytically list your goals in a SMART (specific, measurable, realistic, and time-bound) way. In this way, you list numerous deliverables that your entire team must meet until the set deadline.
- Another way is to set goals based on context instead of measurables. Instead of looking into numbers, your goals will be based on your subjective taste. For example, designing a front page that deserves your team’s praise.
- Lastly, you can also make your goals dynamic. Nothing is set in stone, and your goals change depending on the situation and current need.
- Know What Your Customers Want
Before you even start building your site, you must establish its purpose. Afterward, you must build the site with that in mind. For example, you can design a website that only requires customers to click or tap two or times to get their pizza delivered if you build it with the purpose of being the most convenient and fastest way to order pizza online.
And to get your site’s purpose right, you need to first understand your customers. While it may sound easy, you need to create more objective ways to determine their needs and wants. Hence, refining the identity of your target market is necessary to attain business goals.
Check the following templates to help you out with this aspect:
- Buyer Personas: You can find several buyer-persona templates online that can help your team gain valuable insights. It’s important to focus on your customers’ critical aspects of their journey.
- Business Model Canvas: You can also find a one-page business model canvas that can walk you through the experiences, trigger events, and core problems of your customers. You can use the information in a business model canvas to get a better idea of the hesitations, frustrations, assumptions, and fears that customers have in your industry or business.
- Customer Journey Map: When you use a customer journey map, you can experience your brand from their perspective. By doing so, you can improve your tactics and enhance their experience.
- The Buyer Journey: In a sales funnel, each persona walks through the stages of awareness, increased interest, consideration, and making a final decision. The content and performance of your website will attract prospects, so you can eventually transform them into paying customers.
- Use A Visual Sitemap Generator
A visual sitemap generator is a great tool to help you during the planning and prototyping phases. With one, you can get a bird’s-eye view of your entire site. You can see how your pages are linked and how you can get from point A to point B when navigating your site.
With a robust visual sitemap generator, you can do the following:
- Show the structure of your websites in a more easy-to-digest way to your team and stakeholders.
- Find or discover orphaned pages on your site that don’t link to other pages.
- Audit your site and manage the number of pages it has quickly.
- Refine user flow and create an outline that encourages conversion.
- Improve your site’s SEO.
Conclusion
With a great website project plan, you can attain the website you need to accomplish your business goals. With these optimization tricks, you can rest assured that your site’s development can go without a hitch.
