A well-planned website is usually a better website. With that in mind, we always start a WordPress project by looking at the site’s purpose – and that in turn comes down to (a) who you want to visit the site (visitors), (b) how you’re going to get them to come to the site (traffic sources), and (c) what you want them to do when they land on your site (engagement).
Let’s look at each of these points.
Visitors
What is your target audience like? Who is most important to your business? Usually the priority list looks something like this (in the following order):
- Customers
- Your internal team
- Industry colleagues
- Press & journalists
- The general public
Once you have brainstormed the initial list, it can be very helpful to go through and study these groups in detail. For example, customers are usually broken down into: existing customers, potential customers and perhaps customer “introducers” depending on your needs. We can help you create personas for your main target audience, to help you visualise and understand your key visitor groups (usually we only do this with customers or your key visitor types) so you can make decisions about the website with them in mind.
Personas are useful for considering the goals, desires and constraints of brand buyers and users to guide decisions about a service, product or interaction space such as features, interactions and visual design of a website.
Traffic sources
How will these visitors find your website in the first place? Here’s a look at typical traffic sources for a website, in descending order of volume:
- SEO – people finding you organically through search engines for both brand-related and non-brand-related search terms.
- Social media – sharing and social promotion of content through your online networks and peer groups – e.g. Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn.
- Email marketing – the site must be able to act as a target for marketing campaigns in a way that drives conversions.
- Paid search – often the quickest way to get traffic to your site is to pay for it.
- Other online/offline marketing – this covers everything from paid web directory listings to print ads in newspapers, media advertising on radio or even video games.
- PR – what existing or new PR and industry connections can you use to promote the site?
- Direct – through some form of personal contact: recommendation, interaction with you by phone/email.
Obviously every site is different, but at Angry Creative we always build sites with these traffic sources in mind.
Engagement
What do you want your visitors to do when they visit your site? What would create business value for you? Here’s a look at typical ways visitors will engage with a site (in descending order of importance):
- Making an online purchase
- Data collection through form submissions such as a contact form
- Off-site contact via email and phone with information provided by the site
- Relationship building, e.g.
- Subscribe to your site’s RSS feed
- Follow you on a social network
- Subscribe to your newsletter
- Add a comment on your site and maybe subscribe to a comment thread (if enabled on your site)
- Share your content online via a social network or bookmarking site, or better still, link to it from their own site
- Content interaction (read more content)
So, let’s take a closer look at a few of these ‘calls to action’.
Forms & Data Collection
Forms are usually one of the desired outcomes for a user visiting your site as it is the most direct method of data collection or new customer acquisition. We recommend using Gravity Forms to power the forms on your site because it is powerful, easy to use and extensible. Gravity Forms works ‘well with others’ – for example, PayPal, email list providers like Mailchimp, e-commerce solutions like WooCommerce, and much more. These integrations can streamline your business flows and improve your customer services.
Commenting
Allowing users to comment on your site is a powerful way to increase engagement, loyalty and gain insight through direct communication with your audience. Commenting is usually only enabled for ‘news’ or ‘blog’ type content, rather than for static content. There are also a number of ways to extend commenting.
How will success be measured?
It’s important when investing in a website to know what goals you want to achieve, and to plan to be able to measure against those goals to understand the value that you’ll get back on the investment. For example:
- What numbers do you want to put next to the detailed engagement points?
- How will these measurements be made?
- Who will review these measurements against targets and be responsible for analysing ways to fix failures and expand successes?
It is possible to create custom reports for onsite events using Google Analytics or other services to help you gain insight into how your site is performing and how you can improve it over time.
Summary
Understanding who you want to visit your website, how they will get there and what you want them to do when they are on your site is the foundation for all other planning for your site. It should help you make decisions about your tone, what you write about and how you structure your site.
If you’re reading this because you’re planning a new website with us, make sure to Contact Us if there’s anything specific you’d like us to include in your project. If you’re not an Angry Creative client but found this interesting, book a meeting and we can talk.