The Importance of Writing a Strategic Web Plan

Here are just a few tips on writing your web plan: 

• Review Your Business Plans. Pull out your business plan if you have one, and your marketing plan. These will help you concentrate on your overall business purpose. The web can be exciting and full of opportunity. Only with focus and commitment to realizable goals will you achieve what you are looking for. 

• Identify Your Goals. Will your web site be a way for you to seek new opportunity? Or will it be an attempt to solve a problem you are having? When you commit your thoughts to paper, you are better able to define what you want and explain to others what your needs are. Write it down!

• Quantify Your Goals. Turning your goals into numbers will help you to measure the success of your project and give you the direction and priorities you need to be successful. Change "I don't want to get so many phone calls for questions that I can put on a web site" to "I want to reduce phone calls by 25%." 

• Quantify Your Investment. What kind of time and dollar investments are you capable and willing to make? And what services will these dollars go toward? The web industry is capable of offering a wide range of services and skill levels ö from entirely free to millions of dollars. By being clear about your investment and the tasks you will be performing yourself, you will sooner find what you are looking for. 

• Consider Alternatives. There are many ways to accomplish a single goal. Brainstorm. Perhaps there are some things you can do yourself, or materials you can provide toward the completion of the project. Consider that your web site might be only one piece of your strategy. For example, reducing the number of phone calls you receive every day might mean you need to add your URL to the outgoing voice mail message, or contact your current customers in some way to let them know about the new resource for them. 

• Research. Investigate the costs remaining for those things that you will need to seek help on. These often include setup, hosting, domain registration or transfer ö and perhaps designing, developing, testing, or updating. The costs vary greatly according to your values in expediency and quality.