Setting Goals

Adding every new feature that comes along is not design, it's a jumble sale.

Do you have a clear idea of what you want your web site to achieve? If you don't know where you're going, how do you expect to get there?

Before you do anything else define just what your web site is for. Are you trying to sell, promote, inform, entertain, advise or educate your audience? Perhaps a combination of these? Are you trying to redefine your company's image or to complement other advertising media? Are you providing an online source of knowledge or information, or a place to play games and meet friends?

A site designed to be educational and informative should be very different to one designed to promote and sell. They have different goals driving them and will take very different roads to those goals. So establish where you're going before you start.

Understanding your goal is important. It will also help you keep the project on track. Goals should drive your design, not the other way around. They give you a set of criteria to measure your progress against. Maintaining clarity of focus on your goals is important while the work of producing the site is underway.

It's easy to lose your focus when confronted by all the things you could be doing to the site. The latest browser plugin or HTML tag, a piece of animation, a neat little tool that does something useful for the users, all can add to the distractions along the way. It's easy to get sucked in to using every possible gizmo and gimmick on your site and it will end up looking like a mess. Don't get caught in the "Just because you can" syndrome. With a clear set of goals written down somewhere before you start actually making anything, you have a yardstick to measure the potential success of each new idea that comes your way. Does a new idea take you further towards your goals or does it add something your target audience will appreciate? It should. If it doesn't you don't need it.

A goal statement can be as long or as short as you want it to be. Look at each part of your design and ask yourself if it does anything to further your goals. Everything you do on your web site should be there because you've thought about it and it adds to the aim of the site. Adding every new feature or fad that comes along just for the sake of it is nothing to do with design, that's a jumble sale!

"I want to address a new market for my product. I don't need to sell over the web but I do want to inform and entertain in a way that raises awareness of my product. I don't want to give people a hard sell; I want them to remember the site with fondness when they see the product in the shops. That's when they make their buying decisions."

OK. That's a goal statement you can use to measure ideas for a site. Lets assume you're the designer for a snack foods manufacturer. You might include a section on production methods and the type of ingredients that go into the snacks. This is informative but it's also rather dull and begins to sound like a hard sell. It doesn't do anything to further the manufacturer's goals as set out in the statement above.

So let's consider some alternatives: How about a recipe section with a variety of ideas for different and unusual ways of eating the snacks? The Web and the Internet are global, so let's include recipe ideas from many different countries and we'll encourage readers to send in their own favourite recipes for inclusion on the site. Perhaps with a monthly prize for the best suggestion?

Now we're starting to find ideas that address the project goals. Recipes are informative and entertaining, they encourage readers to come back for more and maybe to contribute some ideas of their own. When readers go to their local store and see the product on the shelves they'll remember a recipe they liked the look of. Perhaps they'll give it a try.

This is just one simple idea. You can probably think of many more that would fit the goal statement and that's why you need that statement! A goal statement will help you to focus on the important elements of your site. If our snack food manufacturer had just handed over his brochure to the designers, with no clear idea of what he wanted from the web, they could easily end up with a rather dull 'brochureware' site which does nothing for him other than give him a web address. Of course if the original goal statement had been "I want to get on the Internet" then it would certainly fulfil that goal.

The goal statement helps you to focus your ideas and gives you something to measure those ideas against. It's your signpost pointing you in the right direction. If your goals are fuzzy or non-existent you can easily find yourself heading in the wrong direction entirely.