Website Designing & Development-Part 3

Setting Smart Goals
When choosing goals for your website, it is not enough simply to produce eloquently worded statements of aspirational intent. Your goals are commitments to yourself (and to whomever pays your bills) that the site will deliver real, tangible value.
You goals must be reasonable and actionable. That is, they must be SMART :
• Specific. Goals must focus on some important aspects and should not be broad on meaningless data. In other words it should be clear and concise and should be up-to-the point, e.g. “Reducig telephone calls about closing dates by 50% by putting highly accurate, clearly written, easily navigable information about closing dates online”.
• Measurable. It should be able to get its objective completed and done. For example, if a website’s Goal is to “increase awareness”, the key measure will be public knowledge. A survey can help establish if that has happened and how much of it was due to the online campaign.
• Achievable. The goal set should be limited and genuine and also achieveable, e.g. would the Goal “to increase revenue by 250%” be achievable?
• Realistic. The target set should be genuine and realistic. If it’s hard enough then proper measures should be taken. That is, it may be possible to achieve a 250% increase in revenue, but it would require 100 extra staff. How realistic is it that these resources will be available?
• Timely. Finally, the Goals must be timely, meaning they should be bound by a timeframe. For example, you may set yourself 12 months within which to achieve your target.
User Needs
Who do you want to use your website? What do they want?
Those are the key questions you need to answer about your users.
There is always a confusion about who your users are? Sometimes the statical data seems to be very much impressive and clearly defines that there is no loss by seeing online traffic on your website but in reality people might be confusd about your website.
For example, your traffic statistics might show that your site attracts thousands of visitors from many places worldwide (e.g. Africa) and that they read hundreds of articles on your site, again and again. This might seem like a success. You could be forgiven for thinking you are serving your users well. But it also puts one more opinion like people are unable to get what’s in your website and how’s it working.
However, unless these people are members of your target audience, they must not be counted as users of your site. Their activity is inconsequential and must be ignored.
You are spending numerable resources on your website so it’s the basic need that everyone cannot be fulfilled. So targeting the major people you should focus on that necessity of people which is demanded more and the data which is not available on your competitors ones. As such, before you create a website you must decide exactly who you are aiming it at. Your website audience is unlikely to be a homogeneous mass. Most organisations find they have at least two or three core audiences.
Researching User Needs
Without doubt you need to look after the needs of people for your website and so you must do some research before making a website.Some of the most popular research techniques include:
• Online survey.
• Focus group.
• Examine website feedback.
Based on all the data gathered, you can then create Personas.
A persona is a description of an idealised website visitor that matches the attributes of the audience being targeted. Personas have been shown to be of great assistance when gathering information about user needs. This is because they provide a focal point for discussing requirements.

Click here for government certification in Web Development