It can be difficult to know where to begin when you want to update your website.  You know that the animated logo in bright pink isn’t doing you any favours but don’t really know where to start when thinking about how you can improve.  Before you write a word of copy or think about the graphics and images you need to do some research. 

Identify the purpose of your site:  Who is your target market and why do they come to your site.  Are they coming to to find out more about what you do?  Are they coming to buy products?  Will most of your traffic be directed by you or do you want to be found using keywords and phrases through the search engines.  Do you want to build a community, earn money through advertising, build a blog, use it as a portfolio of your products /services.  There are many ways you can use your site effectively for your business, what do you want it to do for you?  And more importantly what can you put on the site that is going to convert a visitor to a customer.

Identify the purpose of the update: Do you want to drive more traffic? do you want a better design? do you want to add more content? do you want to change the focus of your content?

Use what you’ve already got:  Go through your website statistics and identify where your existing visitors are going and how they got there ie did they type in your URL, come via search engine (if so which ones ), what search terms did they use to get to you.  Which pages are the most popular, how long are your visitors spending on  your site.

What is your competition doing?  Visit your competition and see what is working for them.  Use different business related search terms and see who is landing at the top, think about why that might be as you visit their site.  Identify what you like and what you don’t and think about what you can put on your site that is as good or better than theirs.

What are people doing in other industries that you can use on your site:  We are all using the internet so much these days, odds are you are visiting sites that you think are really useful and effective, what can you take from other industries / sector websites that might work on your site.

These are only a few of the things you should do before you start planning or building a website.  I will be covering more of the process in later posts.