Mountain Pine Design Philosophy
A Website And Its Worth
Planning ahead to measure your website's success.
More times than not measures of success, or success metrics, are an afterthought as it relates to web site integration. Many web design firms out there do indeed use analytics tools to track your website's traffic, but all too often this feature is routinely added on at the end of the design process. However, what does this measure and how can you utilize this data?
In many instances, the data provided simply lets the website owner know how many people are visiting the site, from where they are visiting, the pages they viewed, and how much time they spent on the site. While this information is interesting, it doesn't prove to be very useful in understanding whether or not your website is helping you to achieve your goals or objectives. So what's the solution?
The solution is simple - ask the right questions at the right time. What are the main objectives of your site? Defining these in the beginning stages of website design not only enables us to come up with a solid strategic website design, but it also allows us to plan ahead and devise a method by which to gauge the website's success by tracking the data and trends in which we are interested. Intelligently designing a site in this manner now not only gives us info about who has visited, for how long and from where, but we also now know how successful we are at reaching our objectives.
This data is valuable feedback as it provides us with a concrete understanding of return on investment (ROI). Further, this data can be broken down and analyzed and can allow us to tweak or re-evaluate various aspects of the site in an intelligent and productive manner. This information will allow us to understand where things break down and in turn, where the changes need to be made to achieve the results for which we are looking.
The resulting value of asking the right questions at the right time is immeasurable and will undoubtedly help you to get the results for which you are looking from your investment.