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Website Designers and Webmasters Business Plan
So you’ve thought it all out. You have the skills to be a
website designer or webmaster, you know what kind of business
form you want to operate, and you’ve already spoken to those
necessary to get the legal paperwork finished. However, you’re
still not quite done. There is still the matter of planning
so that your business succeeds. A business plan is a roadmap
to where you want to be. It gives your business direction
so you can accomplish your goals. Without one, you will not
be prepared to make changes when they are needed, and you
won’t be able to overcome obstacles without a prior plan of
how to overcome them.
What is the purpose of your business? Whom will you sell
to? What will you sell? How will you sell it? What is your
legal form of business? Your business plan must answer those
questions. Why is the business plan so important? It prepares
you for possibilities that could happen, and helps to outline
courses of action to avoid possible problems. You will also
need to include your business goals, company physical address,
phone number, and URL. Once you have all this done, it will
act as your roadmap to business success.
Website Designers and Webmasters Marketing Concepts
If you remember earlier, we had stated that marketing was
a big factor for being a website designer or webmaster. Here’s
a secret that will help you along with this concept. Websites
are marketing tools. Most of the sites online are designed
to sell something. The sales of goods and services are marketing.
So how can you design an effective site if you are not familiar
with marketing concepts? Your potential customer is going
to want a site that performs a specific action. That specific
action can vary from selling something to generating leads.
If you are not familiar with marketing, then you will not
be able to design a site or page that delivers what the potential
customer is expecting from it.
Even before all this, you need to know marketing just to
drive potential customers to your site and generate sales.
To accomplish such tasks, you need to design sites and pages
that rank well with the search engines. They must also attract
targeted visitors, focus on visitor needs, keep visitors on
site, and get the desired response. When I talk of desired
response, I am referring to generating a sale, getting a referral,
or clicking on a link. These are just some of the desired
options that a page or site can accomplish. There are others,
and your potential customers will tell you what they want
a specific page to accomplish.
The second secret to website design involves targeting. Who
do you want to visit the page? What kind of visitors will
provide the best return for the desired option? What would
those people want? What do they need? What solutions do you
or your potential customer offer to help them with these needs?
What makes you or your customer’s offers unique? Knowing this
kind of information will help you to design the page to target
the kinds of visitors you need to accomplish the end desired
result.
Website Design and Webmasters Site Design Format
Page Goals
Now that you’ve thought about all this stuff, it’s time to
start with the design. What is the purpose of the site or
page you are going to create? Think of the goal you have for
this page, or get that goal from your customer if you are
designing for someone else. The goal must be specific, clear,
and concise. Keep it realistic and achievable. Goals like
"I want to generate 1million dollars a day in sales from this
page." are not realistic. Of course, unless you have a couple
million dollars lying around to help get traffic to that page,
then it might be doable. However, I’m not talking about the
millionaire webmasters out there. I’m talking about the common
types and start-ups.
Target Market
What is you or your client’s target market? Who would buy
your goods or services? Who would visit the page or site?
You need to find as much information on this topic as possible.
The more you know about the potential visitor the better you
can design the page to fulfill the potential visitor’s needs.
By filling those needs you will get return visits and keep
the visitor on site. You could also benefit from word of mouth
advertising. They could refer others to your page and gain
you additional customers in the end.
Conduct competitive surveys. Do a search and find your competitors,
then visit their sites and look at the services and goods
they offer. Do you fall in line with their offerings, or do
you exceed them? Maybe you fall short. If you fall short,
then you will want to consider adding to your goods or services
to remain competitive with them. Through this type of research,
if the sites are successful, you can gain insight to visitor
needs. If you are dealing with a customer that needs a site
optimized or redesigned, you can use their access logs to
gain similar information from referring URL’s. We have another
tutorial on log
analysis data that will help you with referral URL’s.
The information will help you tailor your own sites and leverage
your own sales.
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About the Author
James R. Sanders is the owner of Sanders
Consultation Group Plus. He has been a webmaster and website
designer since 1997. He has also been involved in self employment
ventures since 1992. He is presently a contributing author
of NewbieHangout,
and has been published through WebProNews
and 4Rankings.com.
His writing is targeted to webmasters, would be webmasters,
website designers, would be website designers, self employed,
or those researching information looking for solutions to
questions associated with design, business operations, and
promotion today. His goal is to provide practical information
based upon his years of experience to help webmasters, website
designers, and self employed people achieve their goals in
today's competitive global market. You can subscribe to his
free newsletters at SCGP
- Newsletter.
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