• 1. Who is the primary target audience?
     What defines them as a group — their industry? Their job title? Or something else? Focus on describing this group as if they were one single person, instead of a bunch of generic labels.
  2. What action do you want users to take after visiting your site?
     Call you? Order products? Subscribe to a newsletter? Or invite you over for dinner? The answer makes all the difference in what sorts of things are included in the site structure, graphics, content, voice and tone.
  3. What preconceived notion or assumption about you or your competitors do you want to address or change?
     Do people think you’re more expensive than you are? Less reliable? Less nutritious? More old-fashioned? What don’t they know about you that would get them to take the action outlined in Question 2?
  4. What are you? To what “group” do you belong?
     Unless there literally is no one else remotely like you, it’s better to belong to an existing category (‘The world’s best mop!’) than to make up a new one (‘The world’s first and only flangentwerper!’). Customers feel more at ease when choosing among comparable products or services … and they’re not likely to give you even the extra few seconds it would take to educate them about your unique un-categorizability.

  

  5. If you chucked it all and ran off to Fiji, what would your customers or clients buy instead?
     Who are your competitors … and why should people buy your products and services instead of theirs?
  6. *

What happens if you don’t think these questions through first?

You could pay dearly in lost opportunities and increased design fees.

Lost opportunities: Your website is often the thing that most defines you to the outside world. A site that doesn’t seem to understand its own audience — offering the wrong thing to the right people (a new-members-only discount to loyal ‘frequent flyer’ customers), or the right thing to the wrong people (special case pricing on Pinot Noir to customers who bought one bottle of Chardonnay, six years ago) — undermines your credibility, disorienting existing customers and discouraging new ones.

Increased design fees: The ‘measure twice, cut once’ rule applies to websites, too: an ill-considered design can waste shocking amounts of time and resources, because what you don’t get right the first time, you invariably have to spend extra design cycles (and extra money) to correct.

* We’d love the chance to share the other five questions with you … so leave a comment below — or better yet, contact us.