From the course: Building a Small Business Website with Open Source WordPress

Establishing site purpose and goals - WordPress Tutorial

From the course: Building a Small Business Website with Open Source WordPress

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Establishing site purpose and goals

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- [Narrator] Creating a new site can be a fun and exciting process, but it can also become frustrating if you're not clear on your objectives and you find yourself an endless experimentation. To start off strong, you need to identify the purpose of your site. You can find the answer to that by asking yourself the question, why does my business need this website? Maybe you need the website simply to have a professional online presence where customers can find you. That's a straightforward process and one that many small businesses start with. Or maybe the purpose of the website is to sell, educate, build a community, or generate leads. Understanding the purpose of your site will help you as you make decisions regarding the content and features that you want. I'm building a site in this course for a veterinary clinic. The purpose might be to educate our community on how to care for their pets and promote our services. It's not uber-specific, but it certainly adds some parameters to what we're trying to accomplish. Once you have your purpose in mind, the next step is to define your goals. To start, think about your business goals. I'm not even talking about your website yet. I'm just talking about the actual goals for your business. They might revolve around financial growth, employee development, customer outreach, or expanding your product or service offerings. Considering your business goals in light of your website's purpose, you can start to identify the goals for your website. Let's say my three primary business goals are to grow new customers by 10% this quarter, add revenue via our new dental care offering, and be the number one trusted vet clinic in town. So, how could I blend those goals with my site's purpose to determine specific goals for the site? Well, for starters, I want to add a clear call to action on my homepage, inviting new patients to schedule an appointment. I could optionally incentivize them with a coupon for a specific service, and that's a match with my business goals and site purpose. Next, I somehow want to draw attention to the new dental care offering. There are multiple ways I could go about this. I could include an announcement in the header advertising the new service, include a call to action and related blog content, or I could position the new offering at the top of my service list to give it better visibility. Finally, I want to highlight expertise, and I can do that through knowledge sharing on the blog. That supports my purpose of educating the community and also plays into my goal of being a trusted source. I can also demonstrate expertise through testimonials and awards in the footer of my site, which all contribute to my business goals. Once you have your website purpose and goals in mind, you're ready to move to the next step. If this is something you'd like a little more guidance on, I'd highly recommend checking out this course on planning your website.

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