Step 1: Setting goals

Where are we?

There are three steps in creating a site: define goals, design a framework, and fill the framework. Let’s talk about the first one.

This page’s goals

By the end of this page, you should know what goals the following have:

• Those who own the Web site.

• The people who visit the Web site.

• The Webers, the people who develop the Web site.

A case

The ideas in this lesson can get “fluffy.” Let’s tie them to a particular business, so we have something concrete to talk about.

I mainly talk about small businesses in this lesson. But the principles apply to schools, city governments, large companies, and so on.

Clara Cairn owns Delightful Dogs. DD has four locations around a city. Each location offers services and products. The services are grooming, obedience training (mainly for the humans), and drop-in day care. Most of DD’s revenue is from these services. DD also sells products, like toys, collars, leashes, shampoo, food, and diet supplements.

Delightful Dogs has eight employees at its main store, and five at each of the others. DD also has part-time employees, mainly college students and retired people who help out at the day care and training classes.

Clara’s cousin Blair Bulldog put together a Web site a few years ago. It has basic information like maps and store hours. But, well, ... it sucks. It’s ugly, information is hard to find, and there’s a lot it doesn’t say.

Clara hires you to make a better site. You can start from scratch, throwing away the current site.

OK, let’s talk about site goals. We’ll start with site owners, then move on to site visitors.

Owners

Let’s talk about what the owners of a Web site want from their investment. It varies a lot between businesses, of course. But there are some things that just about every own wants.

The bottom line is simple enough. Owners invest in Web sites because they think the sites will help their business.

If you need to explain in one sentence what a Web site can do for a business, here it is:

A Web site can turn site visitors into customers, and keep existing customers coming back.

A visitor is someone who comes to the Web site. They might type the URL into their browser, come via a search engine, get an email from a friend, etc.

I’ll make a big assumption here: business owners know who their customers are, and what their customers want.

Some owners only have a fuzzy idea about these things. This is a problem for Webers. If owners don’t know who their customers are or what they want, it’s hard to create Web sites that attract them. But let’s put that aside for now. Let’s assume that owners know their customers.

Awareness

Clara wants people in her city to know about Delightful Dogs, and what DD can do for them. When people think of “dog grooming” or “dog training,” she would like them to think of DD. They might end up going to a competitor, but she wants DD to be among the choices they select from.

This is about brands. A brand is a set of beliefs that people have. It’s an association between some symbols (logo, business name, product name) and some things of value.

You know a lot of brands. McDonalds, for example, brings to mind cheap, tasty fast food. The company spends a lot of money creating beliefs in people’s brains about symbols like “McDonalds” and “Big Mac.”

Clara should know what she wants the brand “Delightful Dogs” to mean. Maybe “making dogs clean,” “making dogs cute,” and “teaching dogs not to eat a human’s favorite shoes.”

If humans don’t want us to eat their shoes, why do they make them so chewy? Huh? Huh?! Silly humans.

So, the first thing site owners like Clara want is awareness of their brand.

Visitor behavior

Owners often want visitors to do something, like:

• Print a coupon

• Sign up for a newsletter

• Go to a store

• Buy a product

For each one there is a call to action. A call to action encourages site visitors to do something the site owner wants them to do.

Different behaviors involve different amounts of commitment from visitors. The behavior “print a coupon” doesn’t commit the visitor to much. Just a sheet of paper and some button clicks. The next behavior, sign up for a newsletter, requires a little more commitment, since the visitor gives an email address. Going to a store requires even more commitment. And buying a product turns a site visitor into a business customer.

When you create the Delightful Dogs site, you should sprinkle pages with calls to action. For example:

Figure 1. Call to action

Clicking would go to a page where the visitor could set up a grooming appointment.

A call to action should appear wherever the visitor might be thinking about the action. Figure 1 could be on the home page, the main grooming page, and a special offers page.

Control costs

Owners want to (1) make people aware of their business, and (2) encourage visitor behavior. But they want to do this at a reasonable cost.

One way to evaluate a Web site is to look at its cost/benefit ratio. Every dollar spent on the site should yield more than one dollar in profit.

Of course, it’s hard to precisely measure these things, particular benefits. But there are things you can do.

First, work with Clara to understand Delightful Dogs and its customers. Talk to DD’s employees, particularly the ones who are making sales. They will have ideas about what motivates customers. If you can, talk to some of the customers. Ask them what they like about DD.

Design the site around the business. Include calls to action. Include testimonials from happy customers. These things will make Clara happy. She will see that you’re thinking about the business benefits of your technical work.

Second, use the idea of a framework to reduce the cost of creating and updating the site. We’ll talk more about this later, but the essential idea is to create reusable components and share them across pages.

We’ve talked about site owners. They want to build brand awareness, encourage visitor behavior, and control costs. What about the visitors?

Visitor goals

Remember, the site should make visitors into customers. Those visitors who are already customers should find something of value on the site.

Let’s talk about visitor goals. We’ll talk about:

• Personas – profiles of different types of visitors.

• Task goals – things people want to do.

• Experience goals – how pleasant the site is to use.

Personas

Not every customer is alike. Business owners can identify different types of customers. They know they need to appeal to different customers in different ways.

Suppose you ask Clara about her business. Some of her customers want DD to do all of their dog grooming. Other customers don’t want to spend that kind of money. They want to buy good shampoos and clippers, and do it themselves.

Some customers have puppies they want to train. Others have older dogs that don’t need that work.

Some customers indulge their dogs. They buy all sorts of toys and knick knacks. Other customers are more hard nosed. They’ll buy that rope toy, but only if they’re sure that it will help save their shoes.

How do you design a site for all of these different people? Creating personas is a good start. A persona is a description of a typical site visitor. Give the persona a name, and pick a photo. Describe the person.

Here a sample persona for Delightful Dogs:

Figure 2. Persona

You might work with Clara to create about five personas.

Task goals

Visitors come to a site because it does something useful for them. It helps them solve a problem. For each persona, make a list of problems and related task goals.

It can help to think about different stages of the buying decision.

• Early stage customers are hunting for general information about what types of products or services will solve a problem they have.

• Middle stage customers have chosen the type of product or service they want, and are comparing vendors (businesses that sell the product or service).

• Late stage customers have chosen a vendor, and want to make a purchase.

Let’s take Laura, for example.

• Early stage: My dog Snow is lonely during the day when John and I are at work. What can I do about it?

• Middle stage: I’ve decided to drop Snow off at doggy day care once or twice per week. Which businesses in the area offer that service? What does it cost? Where is the day care?

• Late stage: I want to drop Snow off at Delightful Dogs. How do I arrange to do that?

Experience goals

Site visitors have tasks they want to do. But if your site makes the task too unpleasant, visitors will go elsewhere.

You’ll hear the term look and feel. Different people mean different things by look and feel, but they generally have two things in mind:

• Aesthetics

• Usability

Aesthetics

Aesthetics sets the emotional tone of the site. It’s hard to define, since much of it is subconscious. But you can get the sense of it by looking at a site, and writing down a few words that the site invokes. Use words that describing feelings, or are directly linked to feelings.

I looked at this:

Figure 3. Lego home page

I wrote down “fun, play, kids.” “Kids” is not a feeling, but it’s what a psychologist would call an “emotionally laden word.” It’s a word that brings emotions to mind.

Then I looked at this:

Figure 4. Web Designer’s Wall

I wrote down “Arty, fancy, advanced.” The “advanced” might not come up in your head. That shows that people see different things on the same page.

Usability

A site is usable if you can complete tasks quickly and efficiently.

Suppose you’re thinking about starting an online business. You read something on this page that might help. You want to remind yourself to think about it.

See the “Your notes for this page” widget to the right? Of course you do, it’s always there (if you’ve logged in). No scrolling up and down the page to find it. Click Edit, and type your note. You don’t even have to remember to click the Save button; the widget will save automatically after a few seconds.

You might make notes like “Think about this for my business” on lots of pages. It’s hard to remember where all the notes are. But you don’t have to. Open “Your quick links” to the right, and click on “Your page notes.” You’ll see all the notes you’ve made on every page.

This is an example of usability. Make tasks easy for the site visitor. Look at the tasks you created for each persona, and make sure that each one is easy to complete.

We’ve talked about the goals of the site owner, and the site visitor. What about you, the Weber who creates the site?

Weber goals

Satisfy owners and visitors

If you want to get paid, you need to satisfy site owners. Remember that they’re looking for business value. Value is about benefits and costs.

There are two types of costs:

• Initial site development.

• Site maintenance, also called updating.

Later in this lesson, we’ll talk about creating a site framework. One of the main reasons for doing so is cost control. A good framework lets you reuse components, like style sheets and nav bars. This lets you create the site faster and, therefore, more cheaply.

But a framework also helps with maintenance. Suppose you want to change the size of the <h2> font on every page. If you design the framework right, you can change every Web page by just editing one CSS file. It doesn’t matter whether you have 50, 100, or 1,000 pages. It takes you 10 minutes to change all of them. W00f!

To really create the best framework, you’ll need server-side tools like PHP. PHP isn’t in ClientCore, the book you’re reading now. It’s covered in the book ServerCore. But we’ll talk about PHP a little at the end of this lesson.

Personal goals

Most people want to take pride in their work. Webers are no different. It’s personally satisfying when you create something that is really good.

For me, learning is another goal. I try to learn something from every project. It might be a new bit of tech, or a different way of thinking about a business.

Another payoff is expanding your social network. You get to meet all kinds of people. They might become part of your professional network, or maybe just fun people to talk to.

Summary

You’ve learned about the goals that different people have for a Web site.

• Site owners want people to be aware of their brand.

• Owners want site visitors to do something, like print a coupon, or buy a product.

• Owners want to control Web site costs.

• It helps to create personas, descriptions of typical site visitors.

• Visitors come to Web sites to complete tasks. Help them.

• Visitors want sites to be aesthetically pleasing, and usable.

• Webers want to satisfy owners and visitors.

• Webers have personal goals, like taking pride in their work, learning new things, and meeting new people.

What now?

Let’s work on goals for your personal Web site. We’ll also talk about the idea of a “personal brand.”