It’s now time to take step two in achieving your online goals – planning and achieving the e-Strategy.
Planning and preparing the e-Strategy
Your e-Strategy is the map to achieving your online goals. Remember to keep the findings of your needs analysis top-of-mind while preparing your e-Strategy. It’s useful to brainstorm with your web-developer at this point to map out your ideas.
Then decide on the design elements that will best serve your target market. You will find that most successful websites have simple and clear design. Prepare a site map of all the informative pages on your website and determine how much information you will put online and how much you will hold back to generate curiosity. The next step is to formulate the key functionalities. Draw flow charts to clarify various processes and work out how exactly your backend functionalities will help increase productivity.
If you are working on an e-Commerce site, check what payment methods and systems you could use and why. Understand the difference between hosted and 3rd party payment systems. Based on your needs analysis, your developer will be able to advise you on the best payment solution.
If for example, you require a newsletter subscription and delivery system, plan out the various templates and mailing lists that you will need. For example, you may need an email template to promote your featured products or special of the month and another template with which to send out important notices.
If the end users of your product are different to your paying customers, pen down features that will benefit both groups. The priority should be given to your end users however also offer enriching features to your paying customers to save them time and effort.
Plan out what you need to optimise your website for search engines. If your website requires portal marketing, list all the backend functionalities that will facilitate or support various portals. Also factor in reporting features to assess the performance of your website.
Once you have all these functionalities well thought-out, discuss the technologies required for building your website. Plan out the timeframe and milestones needed for various stages. Most importantly, analyse the budget and resources required for your project. You may need to trade-off some features to suit your budget.
E-strategy is all about working out the best possible ways to build your required online solution within an allocated budget. Please feel free to contact me on admin@synapseworldwide.com if you require any help with your e-Strategy
