before starting a website

This slide is for you if: 

• you’re a small business owner • want to be successful with the next generation of your website• looking for easy-to-follow insights on web strategic planning• don’t want to spend large amounts of capital on business analysis

Vision:You need a vision before starting any

project, sounds crazy but it helps!

• Inspiration•What direction you want to take• Keep it short and simple

Mission:Mission statements aren’t just the boring paragraphs

you find on corporate websites!

• Winning ideas• Stand out from the crowd• How will you achieve your vision!

Those nasty buggers – the competition

•Who are your biggest competitors?•What types are they? Indirect and Direct

Indirect and Direct?• Direct competitors offer identical or similar products• Indirect competitors offers close substitutes

List your competitors and answer these questions:

• What are they good at?• What strengths you think could threaten your business?• Anything you think could be a weakness?• What can you leverage from these weaknesses?

You just did a competitive SWOT analysis!

Let’s evaluate the competitor’s websites, shall we

Write down a short blurb about their sites• Is the content helpful?• Do the pages contain valuable information?• How do the sites stand in keyword searches?• Can you sign up for newsletters or promotions?• How easy is it to contact the competition or order services?

What makes you better than the rest?

Competitive advantage can be any of the following:• Cost-leadership• Innovation• Growth• Timely

Your product value proposition• Focus on the primary benefit • NOT features or attributes• Write these in the customer’s perspective• Some ideas: Newness, performance, customization, price

Do you know your customers?• Identify your customers• Be precise• Helps to determine market growth

PersonasWe’re not going into full detail here with Ethnography, use-cases and such…

Call it an introduction to personas – to get you thinking “user-centric”

Who are we building for?Describe your perfect customer visiting your site, is he/she a :• Fanboy• Newbie• Infrequent purchaser

What are their learning styles?

• Audio• Visual • Interactionist

This condensed persona exercise can give you 9 different personas!

“You could have a Fanboy Interactionist persona which would need news feeds, message boards and comments/reviews.”

How do you know if visitors are fanboys or newbies?

Lots of tools available, the easiest ones are:• Task analysis• Online Surveys

Note: More info in the white paper available at: giardgroup.com

Almost done• You should have an excellent idea of what your business does and 

what your competitors are doing. • This is a starting point for results driven website development.• Download the free whitepaper which explains this in more detail on 

http://www.GiardGroup.com

GiardGroup?• GiardGroup Inc. is a privately held company headquartered in

Toronto, Ontario providing value-centric web business analysis and development for small-medium businesses and start-ups. • People wanting to know more about GiardGroup Inc. can visit

http://www.giardgroup.com.