Why Website Goals Matter (Sebastopol talk)

Next week, I’ll be giving a talk for the Sebastopol Entrepreneur’s Program on one of my favorite topics: why website goals matter.

Over ths course of working with hundreds of website owners in the past five years, I’ve found that one of the first places that web projects go wrong is a lack of clarity about the real goals of the site.

For example, we’ve seen people focus on improving a site’s visual appearance when their goal is to get more traffic. They should have focused instead on text content and search engine optimization.

We’ve seen many sites where capturing leads was a key goal (once we ferreted out that fact), yet there was no effective lead capture process built into the site.

One company had what for all appearances was an e-commerce site, yet the real goal was to drive people into the store.

And we’ve seen businesses think they need an app to attract new customers, when a mobile website would be far more effective.

Being clear on goals makes it much easier to decide where to focus your resources, and how to evaluate proposed designs. It also gives you a foundations for evaluating how successful you’ve been.

In this talk, I’ll explore a series of goals that your site may have, and describe some of the implications of each, all illustrated with lots of examples.

The talk is free, but pre-registration is requested, so sign up now.

The meeting is from 6:30 pm to 8 pm at O’Reilly Media, 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, in Sebastopol. I hope to see you there!