Establish site goals and needs

- [Instructor] When building a new website, it's important to start out right. Creating a new site can be a really fun and exciting process but it can also become frustrating if you're not clear on your objectives. You can find yourself in endless experimentation mode. To make your project go as smoothly as possible, I suggest mapping out your goals and needs and figuring out your content before starting the actual process of building the site. Let's start with the goals. You may already have these in mind but if not, ask yourself a simple question. Why do you want a site for your small business? The answers to that question are going to be the goals for your site. In my case, I want a site for my business because I want to generate leads and get new customers and the site will work both as advertising and a way for people to find out about my services. Now, a small business stands and falls on its reputation in the community. So I want my site to communicate experience, integrity and personal service. The site should showcase capabilities and skills and this can be achieved by showcasing the best work the business has done. Knowledge sharing is a great way of boosting the reputation of the business as well as generating leads and clients. Publishing tips, tricks, tutorials and customer stories is vital to becoming a trusted resource for your small business specialty which in my example project is gardening and landscaping. By sharing knowledge, people are more likely to find the site organically and share the content with their friends and connections. Finally, to incentivize new and existing customers, the site can be used to offer specials and promotions. This should be done in a non-obtrusive way and should reflect the values of the company. Next, let's look at the needs that I have for the site. These are the features that must be in place for the site to reach the goals we just talked about. First of all, there must be a clear call to action so people can get in touch with the business right away. This should be displayed on the front page and lead to a contact page with a form so I can collect specific information from potential customers. Ideally, there should also be persistent contact information on the site either in the header or the footer or maybe both. The About page will play a crucial role in bringing home the message of the small business as a value contributor to the community. This page should tell the history of the company and provide team member bios and photos so visitors feel like they know the people they'll be working with. A project gallery should be featured on the front page and made easily accessible to visitors so that they can see the best work the company has done and finally, the site needs a blog where staff members and satisfied customers can share tips, tricks and stories. The blog is a crucial part of the marketing effort for any small business and publishing good, quality informational content on the business field of expertise is likely to generate interest in organic sharing on social media. Now that you've seen how I mapped out my goals and needs, you go ahead and do the same for your site. Chances are our list will be fairly similar but there's also a good chance you have some goals or needs that will be unique to your business and site. Mapping these out right at the start of the project will help guide your process as we dive into content creation in the actual building of the site.