From the course: Building a Small Business Website with Shopify

Establish site purpose and goals - Shopify Tutorial

From the course: Building a Small Business Website with Shopify

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Establish site purpose and goals

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- [Instructor] When building a new website, it's essential to start out right. Creating a new site can be a fun and exciting process, but it can also become frustrating if you're not clear on your objectives and you find yourself in endless experimentation. To start off strong, you need to identify the purpose of the site. You can find the answer to that by asking yourself this question: Why does my business need this website? Maybe you need the website simply to have a professional online presence where customers can find you. That's a straightforward purpose and one that many small businesses start with. Or maybe the purpose of the website is to sell, educate, build a community, or generate leads. Understanding the purpose of your site will help you as you make decisions regarding the content and features that you want on the site. I'm building a site in this course for Two Trees olive oil, a fictional family-run business that farms olives and makes olive oil and related products. Their purpose might be to educate the community about the quality of our products and encourage them to support local. It's not super specific, but it certainly adds some parameters to what we're trying to accomplish. Once you have your purpose in mind, the next step is to define your goals. To start, think about your business goals. I'm not even talking about your website yet. I'm just talking about the actual goals for your business. They might revolve around financial growth, employee development, customer outreach, or expanding your product or service offerings. When you consider your business goals in light of your website's purpose, you can start to identify goals for your website. Let's say my three primary business goals are to grow new customers by 10% this quarter, add revenue via a new infused oils product offering, and increase in-person traffic via tours and events. So how can I blend those goals with my site's purpose to determine site-specific goals? I want to add a clear call to action on my homepage, inviting new customers to enjoy a discount on a first-time purchase. You could also offer an incentive to existing customers when they refer their friends. Next, I somehow want to draw attention to those new infused oils. There are multiple ways that I could go about this. I could include information about it on my homepage, I could write up recipes from my blog that feature those new oils, or I could even position the new offering at the top of my store list to give it better visibility. Finally, I want to get more customers and potential customers to visit the farm and to join store. I can do that by providing information about tours and events on my website and encouraging people to book. That supports my purpose of educating the community and also plays into my goal of encouraging people to support local businesses. Once you have your website purpose and goals in mind, you're ready to move to the next step. If this is something you'd like a little more guidance on, I highly recommend checking out this course on planning your website.

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