J. Austin Hughey

As a current or prospective business owner, you really should know what you’re getting yourself into. Web applications development – from a simple static website to something the size and scope of facebook.com – can get very expensive, very quickly, even on the small scale. Every dollar must be justified before the project can go forward.

Step 1: Define Metrics for Success

How do you define the success of the website? This is perhaps the most important step in the process, and why I lead with it.

For small businesses, this usually falls under one of two categories:

1. Serve Inquiries from potential customers (that originate via offline marketing efforts)
2. Obtain new business

The first of these is the simplest to accomplish because you generally use your site as a tool to answer frequently asked questions (without actually defining a “FAQ”) and mixing it with some cleverly placed sales emphasis.

The second, however, is more complex. This requires the coordination of online and offline marketing efforts, and requires your site to be “in compliance” with those efforts across the board. In other words, you branding, identity, logo and other collateral materials – no matter where they are (billboard, radio, TV, newspaper, magazine, web ad) – must be the exact same everywhere. And that’s just the first step.

The second step would be to coordinate your marketing efforts. How do you intend to drive people to your website? Where will they see your URL and what will be their reason for going? How much traffic can you expect?

Search Engine Optimization and SEO strategies can usually play a role here as well. I recommend keeping a blog that answers specific questions related to your industry, as well as participating heavily in talks, discussions, panels, and events all over the world if possible. This just plain increases your credibility, and as a small business owner, turns you into a bit of a rock star in your own right. If your name carries buzz, customers will definitely follow.

So you need to ask yourself: how will I know whether or not my website was a success? The answer will depend on the outcome of this question:

“Did it do what it was supposed to?”

If your goal was to increase new business, measure how many customers came to you as a result of your web marketing efforts. If your goal was to serve inquiries, find out how many people go to your website through offline marketing efforts (print ad, business card, word of mouth, etc.), and of those that go, how many call you for more information or purchase your product/service?

Step 2: Assess Your Audience

I love the idea behind Capitalism. Because self-interest is the customer’s primary focus (as is human nature), those who serve that self-interest will succeed where others have failed. To do this effectively, you have to know who your audience is.

Find every detail you can about your audience on the demographic, and psychographic, aggregate scales. Never heard those words? Here’s a quick and dirty definition of each:

1. Demographic: statistical information such as age, weight, height, gender, etc.
2. Psychographic: aggregate psychological information. For example, does this “audience” generally respond better to appeals to fear, or appeals to hope?
3. Aggregate: numbers and information en masse. You don’t need to know details about individuals because that’s too narrow a scope. But you DO need to know about them in “large chunks”.

How to use this information

Let’s pretend that you are a Republican candidate for office. Your audience might be men and women ages 35-65 of income levels between $45,000 and higher. You believe – through research you’ve conducted or a meta-study – that they generally respond to fear appeals.

Your marketing communications might play to that fear in a respectful, tasteful way by pointing out the other candidate’s inexperience or playing out a “what if” scenario.

For example, “If candidate X gets elected, he’ll pass new taxes! That means the government makes more money and you make less!”

On the other hand, let’s pretend you’re working on a hope appeal as opposed to fear: “If I get elected, I’ll cut the deficit while reducing taxes for hard working people like you.”

Is the difference clear?

Likewise, a person may not care about the same issues. College-age voters, in this example, generally wouldn’t care as much about taxes. Maybe they do care, for example, about access to college funding. Making the decision of which messages to send to which audiences and in what way is best done when you have good demographic and psychographic data.

So how does that pertain to your website?

You’ll need to know what kind of copy to write, what kind of images or sounds to use, and whether or not to use certain technologies for your audience.

For example, some demographic data I’d gather (in addition to the above) would be:

1. What general age group would be accessing this web site?
2. In what geographic location are they located? Are you advertising locally, nationally?
3. How many of them are in the location and age group specified?
4. How recently were their computers purchased?
5. What browsers – and versions of those browsers – are they using? Microsoft Internet Explorer? Safari? Firefox? Opera? What versions of each?
   1. If you have a present website, use Google Analytics to gather this information about your existing user base. #

And some psychographic data:

1. Does the audience respond to fear appeals or hope appeals?
2. What is the general level of technical aptitude with the audience? Computer illiterate? Barely functional? Expert level?
3. Loyal or fickle? What kind of user base are you dealing with, in general?

For example, let’s pretend that, using the example above, we have the same audience as previously defined. They are located all over the United States so the size of the audience numbers easily into the millions. However, because an estimated 30% of them are computer illiterate, we’ve removed 30% of that audience’s size outright. Another 50% of them are barely functional, meaning their aptitude to use the web for a particular feature is low. However, the remaining 20% are of age group 25-40, make a median income of $35,000 annually, and are generally living in suburbs or on college campuses. This allows us to tailor our web message to that audience. Do you see how we really zeroed in, there?

Using this information, we can now gather psychographic data. Let’s say our research yields the following:

1. Response type: hope (turned off by fear appeals)
2. Generally have a moderate to high degree of technical aptitude
3. Fickle audience, will change their mind at the drop of a hat
4. Highly critical

If this was the case, a political candidate would want to steer clear of negative messages and imagery. Don’t use black – use white. Don’t use red and other “aggressive” colors – stick with calming blue colors. Have a positive, up-beat message and style (responds to: positive appeals). Unify all communications (press releases, brochures, copy, tv ads, etc.) to have the same positive tone (responds to positive appeals, high criticism, fickle audience). Don’t talk much about your competition (no fear appeals). Stay on message, don’t deviate, and keep your message constant (critical, fickle audience). Don’t change your stance or position without an extremely well documented series of studies and references to back up your new belief (critical audience).

As for the technology involved, some demographic information – especially connection speeds, browser and operating system versions, and computer hardware – affect what features can and can’t be developed online. You could have the greatest message board application ever written (maybe in Flex or something), but if nobody’s going to use it, or can’t use it because they’re on slow connections, it’s going to cost more money than it would bring in. Or in the case of our example, do nothing for voter turn-out.

Step 3: Tightly Define Your Scope

Now that we know what we should be doing, what it’s supposed to do, and what our limitations are, we can tightly define scope. This is where ROI – return on investment – can be estimated.

Let’s say that your small business wants to serve incoming customer inquiries that result from your offline marketing efforts. That’s our metric for success.

Now let’s say your audience is on dialup connections, has a low degree of computer literacy, and isn’t apt to use the web for information gathering.

We can define our scope now by making some obvious choices about how much money – and invariably, how much effort – to spend or put into the website. For example, this particular scenario would LOSE money by developing an electronic commerce solution unless the audience was extremely large, and you could absolutely count on a certain percentage to at least buy one or two things over the web. However, since small businesses generally don’t focus on nation-wide audiences, this is rarely the case.

By contrast, let’s say your audience has a moderate degree of technical capability, is nationwide, and is fine with buying online. Would electronic commerce be worth your money? You bet!

But what about design? How much effort/money should be poured into the actual look and feel of the website (instead of the “behind the scenes stuff”)?

Again, this depends on your answers to the above two primary points. If your audience is small and it’s doubtful the majority of them will be willing or able to purchase online, don’t spend a lot of money on design. Get a template of some kind and use that. However, if the audience is larger, and/or more apt to buy online, spend some money on good design from an ad agency or web agency that knows what they’re doing.

The one case in which this may not really apply is for complicated situations where pre-fabricated software and/or design schemes may not exist, or the available implementations cost too much or are shoddy at best. In this case, you may not have any real way around building it yourself. At least if you do this, you can do it right. While the cost may be greater, if you swing it right – including the offline marketing component – it can be worth it.

With these three main points, and the information behind them, in mind, you can make intelligent decisions about your web project. Like everything, you’ll need to change with the times – update your site at least monthly, and change it entirely after no more than 2 years. Your business will have changed drastically in that time frame and the existing build may no longer really fit your business.