Web development: 10 assumptions to think about

Palmer Web Marketing wrote an interesting article about 10 assumptions that must be considered when developing a website.  Below are the 10 assumptions:

  1. People will know how to find your website
  2. People know what you sell
  3. Everything will go as planned
  4. People know where to click
  5. People know how to get home
  6. People know where they are
  7. People know how to buy
  8. People will volunteer loads of personal information
  9. People will contact customer service if they have a question or problem
  10. People will come back

I think assumption 1 and 10 are true within most agencies: people know how to find your site and they will return. Too often we build these great sites for clients, but don’t think about how we are going to drive traffic to the site or what we are going to do to ensure it keeps back. As corny as it is, we need to think of a website being like an island, without bridges it doesn’t get any traffic. It’s our role to define what those bridges are (a combination of paid for and free traffic) and how we can generate a constant stream of traffic to the site/island.

There are so many ways that traffic can be driven to a website (I will post more about this because it is one of my favourite topics):

In regards to driving repeat traffic, this is extremely hard. Question: how many campaign sites do you return to on a weekly basis? I don’t go back to many unless it’s connected to a promotion/competition that I am actually interested in winning or it is one of my client’s competitors sites.

LEARNINGS

If there are two things to take out of this post, they are think about:

  1. How you are going to drive traffic to the site consistently (even after the campaign launch period)
  2. How you will drive traffic back to the site (what’s the incentive? content? promotion? other? Why would they come back?)
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This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Great sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Web development: 10 assumptions to think about”

  1. Mark Dawson Says:
    September 12, 2008 at 6:48 pm

    I definitely agree with the search marketing part!(though am a little biased)…

  2. Justin @ Palmer Web Marketing Says:
    September 18, 2008 at 3:10 am

    Thanks for mentioning the 10 Costly Assumptions post!

  3. Gavin Heaton Says:
    September 23, 2008 at 8:40 am

    We do tend to think of websites as being built around campaigns, but what happens when the campaign ends? Does the consumer’s engagement end? Is there a relationship still to be maintained?

    We need to think about how we lead people through the experience so that when the campaign ends, it does so with as much thought as the campaign launch.

  4. cymberly Says:
    December 3, 2008 at 1:17 pm

    I’m a little unsure about #2.

    A portion of your site traffic has to be attributed to people who have no idea what you do, especially in relation to current technology, where your website can be a link in a random blog that identifies nothing about your company or organization.

    I have no clue what percentage of people come to a website that know nothing about the company, but this would be an interesting statistic to find out. You wouldn’t want to ignore a percentage of site visitors – especially if it was substantial – would you?

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