10 Steps to a Better Website -#2 Plan your content

This is number two in this series. These ten posts are for all the people that say to me, "I'm just not savvy to Internet stuff"
What is the purpose of your website? What do you want to achieve with your site? You need to establish your goals and priorities up front.

Do you want information about your company, products, and services? Or do you want to actually sell your products online? Or maybe influence and motivate potential customers to visit your store or do you want them to just call your phone number? Do you want to brand your company and refine its image? Provide great customer service? Or do you want some combination of all the above?

How you answer these questions will guide the design and development of your site.

You don’t need an elaborate plan. Just sit down with a pencil and a legal pad and answer some of the questions above plus these.

· How many pages do I need?
· Do I have the content already? (* Note-the best investment in your website is to hire a good writer)
· What would be the titles of those pages?
· Find three or four websites you like and tell the Webmaster designing your site that you want something like that. That will help with colors and layout
· Look at several sites that your potential Webmaster has built. If you don’t like the others he/she built, you won’t like yours when it’s finished
· The content will attract or turn away the visitor quickly, and will also play a large part where you rank in the search engines. (Yahoo Google etc)
· Make very sure your text content is not an exact duplicate of another site.