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Goals, What???

Website goals are the most important base structure of any website, be it a college website or e-commerce site. Without goals the site can easily become a mess of pages with no unifying purpose. Which is the case with most college websites; the lack of unifying structure causes users to suffer through their navigation. Your design, marketing campaign, and optimization are all based off of good goals, so if you do not have goals already laid out this post is required reading.

Examples of the good the bad and the OMG-WTF !!!

Some OMG-WTF goals:

1. To provide information to the world
2. To sell our products
3. To get people to sign up
4. To provide information about the college

Some bad goals:

1. To provide information about cars to everyone
2. To sell our sinks
3. To get people to subscribe to our blog
4. To increase interest in the college

Some decent goals:

1. To provide information about cars to males between the ages of 16 and 45
2. To sell our sinks to new home owners
3. To get people to subscribe to our blog about <insert unique blog topic here>
4. To get prospective students to apply and to make it easy for current student to pursue their education.

At a first glance you would think that the decent goals are too confining and do not reach the goals of your company or school. This is not the case, because your goals can change as your school/business changes. For example, the current age of your visitors is between the age of 22 and 40, so a goal of providing information to an age range of 16-45 is an excellent goal. In the case of a college website, if your current goals are to get high school seniors to apply, then opening up the goal to all prospective students is quite the goal( If you have such a goal keep an eye out for the upcoming post on persons).

How to: make goals (soccer pun repressed )

Sit down and write them down on a piece of paper. If there are a number of people who work on the site make sure they sit down individually and come up with goals, then meet to decide which goals best represent the website. Well, it is not that simple, because the main point is to not cheat yourselves into creating weak goals. Make sure the goal is specific and related to your website’s current market.

What not to do:

Do not get in the habit of thinking that sub pages have a more specific goal than the main page. They don’t, they have the same goal with a more specific form of achieving that goal. This can be tricky and results in a lot of debated semantics, but in the end the goal of the website is the same as the goal of each page of the website.

Design with goals in mind

So you have goals, now how to design the layout, look, and structure with goals in mind. Take a piece of paper and have the landing pages at the top and goals at the bottom. Now think, how can I get a person from here to there. Normally, this involves complex persons and funnel processes, but those can not be decided until you have concrete goals.