Building a new website can be an exciting project. For some, it’s a quick and simple task. For others, it might take a bit more time and teamwork. No matter your team’s experience, it’s important that everyone shares the same vision from the start.
That’s why it helps to be clear about what you want your website to do. Setting clear goals will guide your work and keep everyone on track.
When you take the time to define your office’s needs, goals, and key messages—as well as what your users need—your website will do a great job supporting both your team and your audiences. Plus, you’ll be helping to create strong, clear communication across the whole University!
Setting Goals
Goal setting gives a unified vision for your website. This ensures that you are making content that is focused and has your end user in mind. This is ensure that you are focusing on content that matters to your users and your department.
Goals can also help you define what success looks like for your website.
Example Goals:
- We want to cut down on repeat questions.
- We want people to take action.
- We want visitors to find important information easily.
- We want more people to know about us.
- We want people to use our service.
Measuring Success
By setting goals with clear actions, you can measure the success of your website through testing, feedback or Google Analytics.
Example:
If you goals is "We want to cut down on repeat questions", you can measure your success by keep track of how many repeat questions you receive. This can help identify if your website is working for your user.
If your goal is "We want visitors to find important information easily", you might ask some users to provide feedback on your website or do usability testing. You might even use Google Analytics to see how many engaged users you have or what pages they are clicking on.
