What are your Needs?

What

Do Not Fail To Plan

The Ultimate Goal is to launch or grow your business.  This questionaire will help us understand where your business is currently with regards to your branding and website.  It will also help us provide you with the information for you to plan your next step and how to best execute it with your current budget. 

Website functionality is essentially what your website can do and how it works. It encompasses everything from the actions a user can perform to dynamic content and interactivity.

Providing the right functionality is crucial to the success of a website, and it should be an essential part of the planning phase. Before your website is ever written, designed, or coded, you should have a clear scope of the features it will offer. Getting halfway through a website build just to realize that you are missing some essential functionality can quickly derail a project!

So where do you begin narrowing down the requirements for your website? Use this article to guide you through the process of defining your website’s functionality needs.


Website purpose & goals

The purpose of your website should be one of the main factors in deciding what features are needed. What is the end goal for users when visiting your site? To buy a product? To submit contact information?

Whatever the primary purpose, any features that are needed to support it should be made a priority. For example, your website won’t help you convert leads if you forget to include form functionality that makes it easy for users to contact your company online.

Make a list of all the features that are crucial to your goals. Use that list as a log of the minimum functionality requirements for your website.


Audience needs

You should also factor in your audience when defining website features. Think about your target audience and what they are looking for on your website. What are their expectations? What are their needs?If you’ve created audience personas, they will help you answer these questions. If personas aren’t already part of your planning process, consider creating them to help you better understand your audiences.

Take what you know about your audience and translate that into what it means for your website functionality. For example, if you know that users are likely coming to your site for educational information, it might be helpful to provide a search tool. Or, if you have an older audience that might not be as tech-savvy, you’ll want to limit complex functionality that could obscure content.

Choose features that best enable your audience to use and browse your website efficiently.

 

Budget

Be aware of any budget restrictions upfront and keep that in mind during planning. Understand that it isn’t realistic to build a highly interactive website with a small budget and set expectations accordingly.

 For your initial website launch, you might only include your minimum functionality requirements, and then additional functionality can be added on as a second phase.

Whatever your approach, give yourself some wiggle room for fine-tuning functionality. Launching with unpolished features – or worse, broken features – on your website reflects poorly on your company.


Resources

In addition to your budget, website functionality can also be restricted by the resources you have available. This includes not only the technologies you use but your team as well.

Assess the tools that will run your website to determine what features are available. 

Evaluate the skill set of the team building your website as well. Do they have the expertise needed to implement the features you want on your website? Do they work with the technologies required?

Overall, make sure the functionality requirements factor in the resources available to you and fall within their capabilities. Keep in mind that for any third-party functionality, you should thoroughly review options and limitations to ensure you have reasonable expectations for integration.

Content

Consider what types of content you plan to have, and if they need any specific features to be displayed properly.For example, are you planning to write blog posts? If so, then you’ll need to have some type of blogging functionality. Do you have photo galleries? Then you’ll need to determine how to present them.Make a list of any special content you’ll have and decide what features will be needed to display it properly.

Take The Next Step

“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”
A domain name is an address where Internet users can access your website. If you have a domain name reserved, please advise us of the URL.
This is crucial information, as we will need to check and book your domain and provide hosting. Web development can look very different depending on what hosting company you use. The hosting dashboard, CPanel options, and server speed are all important factors. We will need access to the Cpanel if you do. SocialHAT has a preferred hosting partner based on superior service. We are happy to reserve your domain and provide hosting.
Please be sure to select your PRIMARY goal or purpose, as this will help determine the layout, style, and call to actions. The choices are Limited to 3 Options.
Knowing what call to actions our client wants is instrumental in creating a design that lines up with the purpose of your new site.
Getting a clear vision of the functionalities of your site will help prevent your website build costs from increasing as the Project unfolds. Please consider what you need so we can make sure your requirements are catered for.
Minimum of 4 Home, About us, Our services, Contact Us. Please NOTE that additional pages will increase the cost of your project build. Think carefully about your choices.
Please List the Sites and URLs, including features of the site you would like to have. If we can see examples, the development will take less time, cost less and have the functionality you desire. This will provide socialHAT with examples of features that might be difficult to describe. It can be especially helpful for us to know what features they like on competitor sites.
Website content includes — website copy, graphics, images, logo, fonts, etc.
The time required to create the site will determine the pricing. The more your business can supply, the less your site will end up costing. All content must be supplied in a word document under each heading and sub-heading to save on time and development.
Branding includes materials that the website will need to match.
Each Page of your website will need to be populated with information, branding and website assets and icons. Please consider what your Business may be missing and socialHAT will be happy to provide you with a cost on development.
We pride ourselves on Service. We want to ascertain our client’s needs can be met by the deadline. We will provide your business with a timeline based on existing projects on-the-go.
We can supply A cost-effective and affordable monthly maintenance plan in order to keep your site in tip-top shape. A website maintenance plan can include updates for themes and plugins, adding new features through plugins, as well as ongoing changes such as images, prices, backups, etc.
Please think carefully about your choice. Rather stick to one or a couple of Social Media Sites. Social Media takes time and engagement. But it has great rewards for brand expsure and getting your brand name out into the market place.
SocialHAT can assist your business with all of the above. Whether simultaneously or further down the line, we are happy to provide you with an estimate so you are able to budget on your Business requirements and deadlines.

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