our proven method for delivering success

Stage 1. Setting Goals

This stage is about defining long and short term goals for the web site that are realistic and measurable. A lot of web sites have been developed as "me too" exercises, emulating another site's look and feel, and completed without direction or means of measuring success. It is no wonder so many organizations are disillusioned with their website. Setting goals form the foundation on which everything is built. We can assist as a sounding board to establish realistic and appropriate goals. We can advise on their feasibility and give some examples of how businesses have harnessed the unique opportunities of the internet and made it an integral part of their business, rather than an afterthought. At the end of this stage there will be a written and agreed set of measurable goals for the website. We can explain how you can make use of the information that can be gathered about the visitors to your website and their experience. For instance, did you know that you can get an idea of the things that visitors to your pages are most interested in, without even asking them?

Stage 2. Defining Your Audience

Many websites do not take account of the fact that the business they represent will have different customer sets or sectors and that each type of visitor may have different interests or needs. Dell, the computer giant, has one of the most successful websites on the Internet, and illustrates this point well. Their site is divided into sections relating to home users, small businesses, corporations and public sector organizations. As a result of selecting one of these options you are presented with content and options that are appropriate for your needs. This avoids confusing home users with talk of 'highly fault tolerant raid arrays' or boring corporate clients with information on the latest games related hardware. There are other advantages too - making use of this approach can help to measure the number of visitors to the website that fall within each specified market segment.

Stage 3. Audience Experience

When your audience profile has been defined, the next stage will be to define how to achieve your most wanted response from each sector. This could be anything from buying a product to picking up the phone and talking to you. If the aim is to get the audience to buy online, then it is important to get enough information to them to allow them to buy with confidence - while this includes information about your company it must be mostly about the item that is for sale. You need to create an environment of trust with the website, while creating a desire for what you have to offer. If your product or service is not well suited to being ordered online then you will want to talk to your customers over the phone. In this case it is more important to give potential customers a general feeling that they are going to be looked after if and when they do contact you, either by email or by calling. You need to make them feel confident about your company. Being able to respond quickly to email is also important. In some industries not responding with good answers to an email within two hours has been shown to decrease the likelihood of doing business by 75%.

Stage 4. Competitive Comparisons

Researching your competitor's web sites and benchmarking them against your own pages or ideas provides a valuable insight in to the relative strengths and weaknesses of both their business and their site. Key things to assess may include:

  • Do their websites clearly position the business and the services they offer?
  • Do their websites clearly differentiate them from their competition? If so, how?
  • Do they make it clear how to contact them and what to expect if they do?
  • Are they capturing potential customer information in return for an incentive? E.g. a subscription to a newsletter or report.
  • Do the websites load and respond quickly on all occasions?
  • Is the news and information up to date?
  • Is the content useful and informative to their potential customers?
  • Is it easy to navigate around the web site?
  • Does the website create the appropriate image for their business?
  • Are there any aspects you particularly like about their web site?
  • If the web site sells items over the Internet is it, easy, secure, and intuitive to use?
  • Does it explain the level of customer service they can expect and what to do if there is a complaint or problem?
  • Are they making the most of customer testimonials, as well as recognized accreditations and awards?

As a deliverable part of your competition assessment you should list the factors you have identified as important to your potential customers visiting the website and rate your competition on them. From this you will be able to identify how and where you can differentiate yourselves, rather than create a "me too" web site.

Stage 5. Content

Content is one of the most critical aspects of a website. Content can comprise of text, illustrations, pictures and possibly animation, video and sound depending on what your goals, objectives and markets are. During development website projects often get held up through lack of content. This usually stems from not having followed the previous stages and therefore being unclear about the nature of the content required to create the audience experience. To help get things going use the list of audience experiences identified earlier and bullet point the content required to achieve this experience. The content needs to be targeted to achieve your most wanted response from a visitor interested in your products and services. Do not attempt to structure the content at this stage, only once you have the content areas identified and documented, should you move on to the next stage. We can introduce you to the services of specialist copywriters with a wealth of experience in creating appropriate content that creates the impact you require, resulting in the achievement of your most wanted response.

Stage 6. Site Structure and Navigation

The preceding stages have primarily been about creativity and innovation. It is important that this thinking has not been constrained by any pre-existing ideas of structure or navigation. This next stage should only be commenced once you are sure you have identified all the content areas required. The objective of this stage is to tie the pieces of content together into logical groupings and sequences of information that will achieve required audience experiences resulting in your most wanted response. If you have previously identified that your website needs to address multiple audience profiles, use this stage to identify what content each audience profiles needs to see. One way of achieving this is to create navigation systems based around the different audience profiles. I.e. get the customer to declare what profile they are or are interested in (as an example, home user, public sector, Corporate) via the navigation system and use this mechanism to ensure that only appropriate content is subsequently presented to the visitor. You may find there is overlap in terms of the content each audience needs to see. A web site can easily address this need using a well-structured navigation system. The ability to tailor information to specific clients needs is a key benefit over tradition forms of marketing media. A simple concise site may only need a single navigation menu system, typically not more than around six menu options. For more content rich web sites it may be necessary to have a global menu system covering the main content areas, which is complimented by further content or audience specific menu systems to ensure effective navigation through the website. It is often unlikely that all the visitors to your website are at the same level of understanding or require the same level of detail. This is where active links within a page come into their own. They provide additional information to those visitors that may require more information or an explanation on a particular aspect. Menu structures can be created in a variety or combination of ways:

  • Using words e.g. about us, contact us etc
  • Using symbols
  • Using pictures

Often a combination of text and images is an effective way of making the meaning clear and visually appealing. Many web sites are now database driven. If your website has a database in it you need to make sure the specification for this is well documented and agreed too. You need to think about the storage and reporting requirements of the database and how the data collected is presented. In addition there may be a need to integrate the information collected with the rest of the information in your business. Initial database population or migration is an aspect that some time gets overlooked. Make sure the responsibilities in this area are clear. At the end of this stage, the structure and navigation should be clearly documented and agreed with all the necessary parties involved. It is not necessary to have the final proof for the actual text of the web site at this stage but the structure must be defined and agreed.

Stage 7. Design

The design phase should not commence unless the structure is clear. It is equivalent to an architect designing a building without knowing what the building has to achieve and accommodate.

This is the most common mistake made… even by many web design companies. It is down to a natural desire to produce something visual as soon as possible. The design of a web site creates an immediate impact and is how someone will initially make a judgment before looking further.

A poor, cheap or inappropriate style may immediately send the wrong messages about your company. We all know first impressions count, and with a website the look of the design is key to setting the right impression. A good web site developer will take time to listen to the customer about the image they wish to portray. He will also understand how to create the desired impression. The required impression should be clearly documented for clarity. The following (as a minimum) should normally be agreed in advance of any design concepts being produced.

  • Nature of the audience(s)
  • mpression required
  • Use of pictures
  • Use of colors
  • How the navigation options are to be displayed
  • Existing branding and logos
  • Any requirement to adhere to existing standards
  • The consistent information or links that need to appear on every page of the web site

A good developer will provide between 2 and 3 initial design concepts where necessary (usually one page per concept, but may be more for larger web sites). The customer needs to provide feedback on the concepts produced with a view to the developer creating a final concept for approval and sign off. Getting views from customer and other third parties willing to be candid helps to ensure the appropriate impressions are being made. The objective of this stage is sign off of an agreed concept. The requirements and design need to be set in stone at this point to avoid further effort and cost before the project is finished.

Stage 8. Development Tools and Hosting

Web sites are getting more sophisticated in their capability, much of the capability is dependant on the web site hosting providers having specific hosting platforms and hosting software to support these new features. Where possible try to go to a web site development company that will arrange the hosting for you and take responsibility for solving problems irrelevant of whether they are caused by the website or hosting platform. Nakea is ideally positioned to assist as we develop and host web sites using well established industry standard software and our own in-house resources.

We can be your one stop shop for website development, hosting, security considerations, domain names, email response forms and email lists for user groups, as well as helping you through the whole process and much more besides. If you have a need to continually update your website, with new events or news or opportunities, make sure you find a company that is able to offer you the ability to do this yourself using basic keyboard skills. This will reduce your cost of running the site and increase your responsiveness to your customers. There is nothing worse than a web site with a news page that was last updated two years ago. Nakea specializes in developing administrative interfaces that allow you to control every aspect of your site.

Stage 9. Testing

The most common errors are:

  • Missing links - pages missing or links not named correctly
  • Email response forms that don't work or stop working
  • Missing pictures.
  • Grammatical and typographic errors
  • Version control issues, which mean those old corrected errors reappearing at some point in the future. * The site taking too long to load - usually due to pictures and images not being optimized for use on a website, or due to inappropriate or excessive use of pictures/animation.

Most web development companies will add content as it is sent to them and paste it into the website…. So the "rubbish in" … "rubbish out" principle tends to apply too. There is no substitute for thorough testing of the whole site by you, the customer and getting a number of people to test the site feeding back through a single point of contact in your organization, to avoid multiple versions of the same correction. We also recommend you check your web site at least every quarter to ensure everything is still working, as it should. For instance external links to other sites may have changed or the response email may have stopped working. The web site may have slowed down, as the hosting company may not have increased its hosting capacity in line with the new business it has taken on.

Stage 10. Maintenance, Updating and Monitoring Performance

It is unlikely that an effective web site can be run without some maintenance updating and performance measurement. The maintenance aspects should have already been thought about during the development process. In situations where the information needs to be updated on a regular basis, you may wish to be able to do this easily yourself. If you want a developer to do updates for you we recommend agreeing to a schedule of rates and service level in advance to reduce the likelihood of future issues on this matter.

A web site is one of the few marketing tools where you can directly measure the impact and success of what has been created. For web sites hosted by Nakea we can offer very comprehensive web site visitors statistics. The information is far more detailed than a simple hit counter and can provides valuable insight in to the effectiveness of a web site and how it can be improved and developed. This feedback information is available at any time through a password protected web site which presents the information for your own web site in both graphical and numerical format.