15 Questions To Answer Before Building Your Website

As businesses move online, everyone needs a web presence. Every product ranging from SaaS software to fragmented soaps shop needs a website to educate their users and even make a purchase.

One always imagines a fairy tale to their website- Build a silver shiny website where people would read on, grasp the message, get convinced, sign up, and pay dollars.

The only dark side of this story is that it is seldom true.

Upto 90% of websites on the internet are not visited by anyone except the owners themselves.

Just like anything else, website development too needs a proper plan that when executed well takes the guesswork out of the equation.

In this blog, we help you with 15 questions that you need to ask yourself before building your website. Finding answers to these questions will lead you to decipher your own latent needs and discover the why behind the what.

When you do this, it will make your decision-making easy in terms of what goes on the website, what is highlighted on the homepage, what comes in the menu, and so on.

Go ahead and read- 15 questions that any marketing website owner should answer before building the website.

1. What Is The Objective Of Your Website?

This question paves the foundation of your journey to build a website. You need to write down the purpose of your website. Why are you building this? Is your objective educating the customer or is it selling online or what. This forms the basis of many decisions that you would take gradually.

You need to think about the goals of your website, the need for it so as to avoid building an aimless chaotic page on the internet without serving any purpose.

2. Why Do You Want A New Website?

This is part of question one but applicable to those who already have a website but want to build a new one. If you require a new website because the current one lacks stickiness, you do not want to make the same mistake twice? Right?

Start by writing down why you need to upgrade and the objective of the new website.

For many people, it may not be as simple as it may sound. Many times when I discuss website requirements with founders, their reason to upgrade is

“I just don’t like it. It’s plain and simple. I want something like XYZ.com”

You can’t copy a website strategy just like you cannot copy Berkshire Hathaway stocks list. Why? Because you do not know why they have done what they have done and when they plan to change it.

Additionally, you have to find reasons why the current website has not worked. Is it the website structure, content, SEO, or all of them?

3. Who Is The Target Audience Of Your Website?

This question asks about the identification of your audience, which indeed is the most important part of any website strategy. You have to identify who you are building for.

Identifying your target audience before designing your website would help you take your other decisions such as appropriate content, the look, and feel, brand attributes, etc.

A user persona usually has interests, demographics, technical ability, likes, and dislikes defined for the end-user. Your platform can have multiple user personas as well.

4. Why Would Users Come To Your Website?

When you have understood the target audience of your website and their journey to your website, the next question is what users want. You need to understand your visitor’s motivation and plan the information map for your website accordingly.

A user is knocking on your door. If they get what they are looking for, they would decide to stay on your website and maybe do the transaction as well.

Hence your website development process should be constantly thinking about the end-users. Your website copy should be written keeping the users in mind similarly.

5. What Are The Features That You Would Like On Your Website?

Once you have understood the purpose of your website, the next thing is what you want on your website. At this point, you should think through what is important and what is not so important while you build your vision.

It is important to say no to things as well because otherwise including everything may end up cluttering your website and increase the complexity.

A useful way to judge this could be by understanding your target audience and considering things that are most important for them.

Different websites would have different priorities according to the nature of the business. While an eCommerce website would focus on the placement of items, reviews, and urgency to buy, a B2B service agency website should focus on social proof, differentiators and answering why they should be considered.

You should have a must-have list and a nice to have a list.

Here is a list of ideas to choose from

• Newsletter signup
• Social Integration
• Third-party integration (CRM, forms, animation etc)
• Payment
• Videos
• Dynamic content
• Multilingual
• Search functionality

6. What Are Your Major Brand Attributes?

Brand attributes define the main properties of your brand/company and its influence on the users. This includes logos, typography, colors, packaging, and messaging, and it complements and reinforces the existing reputation of a brand.

Brand identity attracts new customers to a brand while making existing customers feel at home.

If you are a new brand, then you should invest time in building a user persona and the top things that your brand would be recognized for. Would it be innovation, environmental consciousness, process, customer care, predictability, assurance, and so on?

You have to find out “What are the things that my customers think or would be thinking when my brand comes to their mind?”

Once you have that sorted, you should have your brand attributes such as color, logo, typography, etc reflect it.

Want to read more? Check our blog on 15 Questions To Answer Before Building Your Website (9th and 12th question is crucial for your website's success!)