May 01, 2008
Why Build a Website In the First Place?
This question is frequently the elephant in the room when organizations sit down to discuss their Web presence. People tend to focus on what the site will look like, what widgets and features it will have, and what it will do. Some organizations miss out on why they are building the site in the first place.
When the World Wide Web exploded on the scene in the mid-’90s, there was a desperate scramble to get on the Web, whatever that meant. It was the new frontier. Stake a flag, snatch a domain—if you build it, they will come. There was so much focus on simply creating a Web presence that frequently the question of “why?” wasn’t adequately addressed.
Now, the “ding ding shhhhhh” of dial-up is gone. We have more bandwidth, better browsers, and a broad range of platforms for Website deployment. There are all sorts of gimmicks that can be used to make sites look and work great—interactive Flash, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets, Flex, AJAX controls, postbacks, widgets, portals, vortals, lions, tigers and bears. Oh my!
There is a wealth of technology at our fingertips, but because the Web is primarily a visual medium, it is easy to get caught up in worrying about how things look and what widgets and features are neat, keen, or all the rage. Websites can be well designed aesthetically, work smoothly, and have all of the Web 2.0 features that your clients and visitors expect, and yet still fail. Why is that? These all take care of the what, and are very important. But Websites without a strongly defined why will ultimately suffer.
Building a Website is a business decision. There are up-front costs, maintenance costs, hosting costs, costs to create and update content, and more. As with all business decisions, it is important to weigh the costs and benefits, both financial and from an overall business perspective. Take time to answer why:
- Why are you building/updating the site?
- Why will people come to your site?
- Why is it important here and now for your organization to have a Web presence? To sell product, be a resource for information, build community, etc?
- Why is your current site not meeting your needs?
Weighing these questions will dramatically improve the impact your site has on your business and potentially cut your costs by filtering out extraneous features. Maybe it’s not important to “keep up with the Joneses” and deploy a Web content management system, bolt on community features, or other visual effects and/or features, because they are not in line with your mission and business goals for the site. Maybe these are exactly the tools that your organization needs to succeed online. You will only know if you clearly weigh your options against your organization’s business goals.
As you consider creating or updating your Web presence, please take the time in the calm before the storm to clearly define why the site exists. It might be the most important question you answer.
Posted at 06:04 pm by Craig McEldowney
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