Planning for a website starts with defining the overall business objectives or requirements the web site must achieve to be considered successful. This is the first step in defining your Web Strategy. This article focuses on how to go about defining these objectives, who should be involved and how to define the success metrics that will tell if the objectives have been met.
To define business objectives, one or more planning sessions must be held. These sessions should focus on the overall business objectives and not detailed functional or technical requirements (these requirements are defined in later phases). The following information should be prepared and distributed for review prior to the first session.
- An internal analysis of any existing web sites
- An inventory of top-level business functions
- An analysis of any partner sites and the services they offer to their partnering businesses
- A competitive analysis of web sites owned by the competition
- Any case studies available that show how other companies in similar situations are using the web.
It may help to break the pre-reading material down into several sessions and plan the sessions around reviewing and discussing the impact of that material on what the business wants to achieve.
