If you remember our previous article, every website out there needs goals. Without specific goals, websites are not effective and become “wasted money” instead of an “investment”. We even gave you a homework there. We hope you did it. If you are just here for the first time, then you may want to read that article before this one for better understanding.

Effective websites are planned

Now that you know that effective websites have goals (and that you have probably written your goals down too), time has come to turn those goals into an effective design setting. Let’s imagine company A is an official representative of a car brand, and that it sells both new cars as well as spare parts.

The owner will have two goals in mind for his website:

• To sell cars
• To sell spare parts for cars of the same brand

With those goals clear, let’s think about what we need for to do for users to achieve these goals.

This car dealer will need to have the visitor…

• Inquire how much a car costs, by contacting them; or…
• Purchase, or at least ask for a price and availability of a specific spare part

Yet…

• To be able to inquire about a car, visitor first needs to be really interested in either buying, asking specifics (whether they sell that model with automatic transmission instead of mechanic, for example), or at least getting more information about it (like what gas mileage the car has, etc.).
• To be able to buy a spare part, he first needs to select the car make, model, year and spare part visitor needs.

You see how we are starting to get an outline from all this reasoning? Let’s make it clearer now for this client’s website:

• Step one: The visitor arrives to the home page and chooses either to go to the new cars section or to the spare parts section.
• Step two has two options:
  • If the visitor is going to the new cars section, then he needs to select a car from a list so he can read the details about it, and possibly inquire too.
  • If the visitor is going to the spare parts section, then he needs to select a car make, model, year and the spare part he wants or needs
• Step three also depends on the user choice too, but we just have two options again:
  • If users are in the new cars section, then they should get interested enough to contact the car dealer to inquire about one or more specific cars. Sure they may have checked more than one car models before taking this step, but that’s OK. Those who are about to buy a new car usually compare before buying, and it is perfectly fine. Still, the information on the web page needs to be as complete and convincing as possible to have visitors go ahead and inquire.
  • If users are in the spare parts section, then they should be able to read how much the selected spare part costs, its availability, payment options and product guarantee. All in all, they need to read information that will lead them to go behind any doubt that would stop them from buying.
• Step four: Once the inquiry is received, the company sales team needs to grab the lead and try to make the sale happen. Cha-ching!

You can see the fruits of a planned website, don’t you? User-friendliness, effectiveness, results, and profits. Now adapt this to your need and business, draft a flow chart for your site, and contact us once you are ready so we can help you build the best website you can get. Oh, and if you read this article and you think you want some changes done to your current site, go ahead. We will be glad to help you too, regardless of whether we designed your site in the first place or not.

In the next article we will talk about how to write your articles for your site. I wouldn’t miss that one if I were you.