Web Site Planning Process: Strategy Development

Including the last post I made, the following is the second in a series of entries on web site planning. The series follows CU Village’s web site planning model that includes six phases: 1) Goal Setting , 2) Strategy Development, 3) Decision Making, 4) Site Development, 5) Site Launch and 6) Maintenance and Growth.

Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.
-Alexander Graham Bell

In my last post I talked about the importance of setting two types of goals for your web site. The first set defines what you want to get out your site. The second set includes what your members want out of it. Once you have the goals defined, it is the marriage of them that should drive everything you do and have on your site.

But how do you translate those goals into web site strategies or actions and make the marriage happen?

You start by wish listing—pie-in-the-sky, budget doesn’t matter, out-of-box kind of thinking. I like wish lists because I like knowing what all my options are before making a decision, and because the process gets the creative juices flowing in terms of coming up with lots of ideas on how to tackle any given issue.

To get the ball rolling take a goal-pairing like “improve members’ ability to access services” (your goal) with “convenience” (your members’ goal) and start brainstorming all the ways you can accomplish these goals through your site. You’ll likely come up with answers such as home banking, bill pay, online applications and the like. You may also come up things like instant chat, click-to-call or using Twitter for member service (Crazy idea? Wells Fargo is doing it at http://twitter.com/Ask_WellsFargo). Thoughts about content and site organization should also come into play because they can contribute much to the “convenience” of your site.

In the end, what you will ultimately have is a list of all the strategies you could employ to help you meet your goals on your web site. Some of them you will do, some you won’t ever touch and some you may do in the future. The point is that you’ve critically thought about how to tie what you do on your site with what it needs to accomplish for you and your members.

Once you have your list of all the options/strategies you have to achieve your goals, the next step is the process of prioritization and decision making, which I will address in my next post in the series.