1. Your target audience

You must determine a clear idea of your target audience who will dictate your content, even your marketing approaches. Even if the Internet reaches the world, the world is not your audience, but only its specific section.

• What are the expectations of your typical customer from a website such as yours?
• How will you provide user satisfaction?

Your website must meet at the very least the minimum expectations of your customers.

2. Your goals

Given the audience you have identified for your site, the next step is to determine what you will do for this audience.

• Will you give them information?
• Will you offer them unique products?
• Will you offer them low prices?
• How will your site be a valuable resource or tool for them?

3. Your competition

The first step is to make a list of the number of players offering the same type of information, products or services out there.

• Study the different information and features on their website.
• Gauge the technology used to serve the content (e.g. multimedia, flash, etc.).
• Understand what makes people flock to these websites and what makes these websites successful.

You need to think how you will differentiate your web site from the competition.

• Why will users go to your site instead of your competitors?
• Why will they buy from you?
• How can you make your offerings more attractive to your users?

To survive, you need to think of ways to set your site apart from the rest of the competition.

• Your site needs to be distinct.
• Your users need to think that you are unique, a cut above the rest, even irreplaceable.

4. Your performance

Right at the start – before even launching the website – you need to define your measures of success.You need to have quantifiable and qualitative measures of success to gauge the performance of your website. These metrics will help you assess your current performance and help you assess succeeding improvements. The various metrics will provide you with a complete picture of your site’s performance, and can provide you with the confidence to make future decisions. Here are some of the metrics that you need to understand:

Traffic metrics

• How many people are visiting your site?
• Where are they coming from?
• What sites are linking and bringing traffic to your website?
• What keywords do visitors use in the search engines to find your site?
• How long are they staying in your site?

Transaction metrics

• What is your daily/weekly/sales volume?
• If your website is a means to get people to your physical store, do you know how many customers are actually going to your store because they chanced upon your website?
• What is your target conversion rate and return on investment (ROI)?

Customer satisfaction

While it may be hard to quantify customer satisfaction, you need to have some measure to know what your customers actually feel about your website.

5. Have you developed your benchmarks?

Benchmarks allow you to get an idea of how everybody else is doing relative to your own performance. By knowing how others are doing, you get a better sense and confidence in the metrics that you see in your own site, and you get a clearer picture of your performance. Benchmarking entails looking at the data and metrics of your competitors, other retailers, and other leading sites in your industry. While you may not have the resources to research and get the data, a simple technique will do: make a list of the top sites (based on buzz, top-of-mind awareness, ranking in the search engines) in your category and write down what they do best; then make a list of the sites at the bottom of the heap and see what are they doing wrong.