Designing Your Website to Match Your Business Goals

  • Topic:  Designing Your Website to Match Your Business Goals
  • Recorded:  July 3, 2013
  • Length:  1 hour
  • Cost:  Free
  • Presented by:  Michael Slater, President of Webvanta
  • Who should attend:  Business owners, marketing managers, website managers

We don't have any scheduled dates for this webinar right now, but you can watch the recording any time.


While working with hundreds of website owners in the past five years, we've found that one of the most common places that web projects go wrong is a lack of clarity about the primary goals of the site.

The web is a vast canvas full of possibility. This is a wonderful thing, as long as you are clear on the goals you have for your site, and you understand how the site's design can help — or hinder — your progress toward those goals.

All too often, however, designs get drawn astray, and it takes a broad view and relentless focus to keep your efforts centered on achieving your goals.

In this webinar, Webvanta president Michael Slater will use two dozen examples to illustrate different website goals and how to design to optimize for them. Possible goals goals include:

  • Sell products or services online
  • Drive traffic into retail stores
  • Generate sales leads
  • Build a brand
  • Create a following
  • Further a cause
  • Sell advertising
  • Serve employees and partners

While it is possible to pursue multiple goals at the same time, the examples will illustrate how effort that goes into secondary goals often takes away from the primary goal.

How lack of goal clarity leads to ineffective sites

One business manager was focused on improving a site's visual appearance, when their goal was 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.

A lead-capture goal can get mixed up with a market-research goal, resulting in a lead-capture form that was too long to be effective.

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

Another had a business plan based on advertising on the site, yet much of the content was locked away behind a registration "wall".

Getting Clear

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.

This webinar will help anyone who is dealing with setting direction for a website project, or who is charged with getting a wayward project back on track.