Planning

Like building a house without a proper plan in place before construction begins, costly and time consuming mistakes will happen. Planning begins, not with the specifics of what you want to see in your website, but with examining your overall corporate business strategy or business plan. If you don't have a business plan, you need to do one. A business plan details how you intend to build your business over the next few years looking at your core competencies, your strengths and weaknesses, your competition, and other factors which affect your business. Part of your overall business plan is how a web presence will help enable your business plan. Some of the questions which must be answered are:

1. Why do you want a website?

2. What will it do for your business (what do you need it to do)?

3. What do you want your website to do for your business (your wish list)?

4. What is your target audience and what are their wants and needs?

5. What general website capabilities do you need?

6. What resources do you need for content management, programming, and website hosting?

7. How do you motivate employees (or other key personnel involved in the creation process) to contribute to the website content? 

Depending on your corporate strategy, the planning stage could be very short or very long. For example, if all you want is a corporate brochure site (a simple site which lists your contact information and what you do)  then planning is easy. However, the more capabilities you intend to implement into your website the more complex the planning needs to be. 

Visit websites and make notes of capabilities you would like to see in your own site. Make connections between capabilities and your business plan. Since cost and development time increase with added capabilities, do not enable capabilities which contribute only marginally to your business plan. Remember, all decisions in the planning stage should be part of a feedback loop to your business plan. Your business plan may change or your web strategy may change during the website creation process. Click HERE for a pictorial representation of the feedback mechanism.

Chartered Accountants with an IT designation specialty can advise the small business owner on IT solutions and resolutions to problems. Contact Keith Anderson CA-IT  at (780) 447-5830 if you have further questions,  concerns, or the need for advice.

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