When designing a new website for your business it’s essential that you have a clear goal in mind. This may be to increase sales, build upon your brand or improve authority within your industry. Whatever the goal the design and functionality of your website will dictate whether you’re successful in achieving that goal or not.

Within this article I’ll delve into setting goals, maintaining focus on those goals and measuring the success of achieving those goals when designing your website. Assuming you consider each of the insights shared within this article you’re certain to design and launch a website which will help your business achieve its goals and grow moving forward.

Setting S.M.A.R.T Goals

The key to setting a goal is for it to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. Assuming you consider each element of a S.M.A.R.T goal you should be able to achieve it relatively easily.

Specific

Being specific is at the heart of any achievable goal. Ensure your goal isn’t ‘fluffy’ and that anybody who comes into contact with this goal is able to understand it. A good example of a specific goal is to ‘increase sales’. When presented with this goal it’s impossible to misunderstand what the end results will be – more sales.

Measurable

If your goal isn’t measurable you’ll never know whether you were successful in achieving it. Therefore, make sure your goal is easily measurable and can be backed up by data. For example, if your aim is to become an autoreactive figure within your industry, this could be measured by the number of visitors to your website. Equally, if you aim to increase sales this could be measured by the number of conversions that take place on your website.

Attainable

Never set unrealistic goals and ensure that every goal can be achieved within your budget and time-frame. What you want to achieve through your new web design must also work hand-in-hand with your offline capabilities. For example, if you want to increase sales by 30% but only have the offline resources big enough to handle an increase of 10% this is ultimately unattainable.

Relevant

Every goal must be relevant to your business and its overall ambitions. Otherwise you’ll often find that the effort that goes into that particular goal is weak and as a result isn’t successful.

Time-bound

Simply setting the goal to ‘increase sales by 20%’ isn’t enough. It must be time bound, and therefore, when setting any goal you must set a time limit (e.g. ‘increase sales by 20% by the end of Q3’).

Maintaining These Goals

To ensure that these goals are accepted by your internal team or web design agency you must talk them through it, ensure they understand the reasoning behind the goal and the benefits of achieving it. Following this, you must maintain that morale and ensure that it is always at the forefront of their minds when designing and developing your businesses website.

If you’re managing the design of your new website it’s always good to be a natural leader. This will allow you to maintain these goals among your internal or external team and ultimately follow it through to achieving these goals.

Measuring the Success of Your Goals

Now that you’ve set S.M.A.R.T goals and have maintained these goals throughout the design and development of your new website, you must measure it success. It’s at this stage you will benefit from setting a specific goal that is both measurable, attainable and time-bound.

Utilise tools such as Google Analytics and your internal CMS to back this success up with data is essential. You must also admit when you’ve failed to achieve a goal. This allows you to reflect and potentially set new goals and generate a ROI on your new website.

Urban Media, a web design agency in High Wycombe, works with your team to design and develop websites which ultimately help you achieve your goals and an ROI. With over 18 years of experience in web design and online marketing, they help businesses across Buckinghamshire reach, engage with, and convert prospects through the web. Visit their website here to find out more.