Before you build - a guide to developing a winning website (Part 2)
by Randall McCarley
October 24th, 2006
Step 2: Determine Success
How will you know if your site is successful? Will it be by quantity of visits? Percent of conversions? Dollar amount in sales? Or something else? Usually for a site to be considered really successful there is more than one benchmark that must be reached. This is where listing results comes in.
Your list of results needs to be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-based. SMART results are definite. The key is being able to clearly state “yes that happened” or “no it didn’t”.
SMART result: The site passes W3C validation for HTML and CSS
unSMART result: The site is pretty
“Pretty” is subjective. And how “pretty” is the site? How will you measure it?
Good results for a web site are:
- The site launches January 22, 2007.
- The site passes W3C validation for HTML and CSS
- The site generates 100 unique visits per day by February 14, 2007
- 30% of site viewers return within 14 days
- 20% of the viewers bookmark a page within the site
- 10% of the viewers sign up for an account
- 200 accounts are created by February 14, 2007
- Site traffic increases by 15% per week
- The site generates $600 per day in sales by February 14, 2007
- The blog is updated each weekday (excluding holidays)
Note how clear and concise these results are. They state exactly what will happen and when. There are many more results you can include but these are somewhat standard.
About time: All dates should be considered as of the time of launch unless otherwise specified. Indefinite timelines should be considered to hold until the next site review where a new list of results will be generated.
Flickr only has two results. But they are very powerful results.
Next Article: Optimize your site to increase search engine traffic immediately Previous Article: Before you build - a guide to developing a winning website (Part 1)