Goals Page: Keep Your Website in Focus and On Track

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

Your website needs a goal, or a set of very closely related goals to help keep you on track.

This list is a really good one for getting started, and was taken from a post by Drayton Bird:

• What is your website for?

  Write out your grand vision. This is where your passion should flow out, creating an image in your mind of such strength that you have a bottomless well of enthusiasm helping drive you forward.

Hey! You're in the middle of the Website In A Weekend eCourse. Learn how to create and operate a complete WordPress-based website in a single weekend. Start here: Website In A Weekend: Friday Evening - Off to the Races. (If you already have a blog... "audit" the eCourse... you'll find plenty to do.)
• What am I doing to get people to go to it?

  Getting people to your website, as reader or customers, is called “building traffic.” There are many, many ways to build traffic, and you can build traffic organically as you create your website.

• What am I doing to get people to stay on it for as long as possible

  The more valuable information, education or entertainment people find on your website, the more likely they are to read more, and if you have products, the more likely they are to purchase from you.

• What am I doing to collect names?

  If you are creating a website for products and services, you will soon need to learn who your customers are, and establish communication with them. The most common way to do this is by using a mailing list. We’ll have more information on how to use mailing lists, and how to purchase the appropriate mailing list service (these services are inexpensive, it’s something you really don’t want to do yourself).

• What am I doing to turn those names into money?

  Turning names into money is a bit beyond our scope for your first 48 hours, but we’ll make sure you build this infrastructure into your website as we go.

• What am I doing to measure what happens on my website? (Google Analytics is almost entirely free).

  You need a Google Analytics account. Get a Google account if you don’t already have one and sign up for Analytics. It’s easy and it’s free. We’ll have a lesson on using Analytics in the future.

• Is the copy in English or is it pretentious jargon? (Drayton notes he spends a lot of time rewriting website copy; starting by asking people what they actually mean by some of the phrases they use; many [he notes] find this quite taxing.

  Writing effective copy is critical. Even you have no interest in selling products or services, growing your readership requires effective written communication. There is a vast amount of material available on the web to help you learn to write. We’ll examine some of these in future posts.

How to add your “Goals” page

1. Pages > Add New
2. Page title should be “Goals”
3. Copy the list above into your Goals page
4. In the Publish widget (up and right from your page editor), set the “Visibility” to “Password Protected.” Make sure to click “Ok” to save your changes.
5. Publish the post.

Next, log out of your website and visit the page. The URL pattern should be be “http://yourwebsitename.com/goals” where “yourwebsitename” is, of course, the name of your web site.

Now you have the goals for your website in an easy-to-find location, but only you can see them.

You may want to make your goals public, as I have: Goals for Website-In-A-Weekend. If so, skip the password-protection step above.

Make your Goals page now

It’s worth doing, whether you decide to password-protect or not. If you decide to password protect, you will be in good company.

Let’s have some reader participation:

1. How would you like to see your Goals page listed here?
2. Would you like to be second? Send a link to your Goals page. Password protected is cool too.
3. How about third? Do it now!

[First published on: Feb 8, 2009]

Tagged as: Blogging success, Goals, Heroes link!