Setting Personal Goals

Often when building a website it’s natural to put all of your focus on the website. We can spend hours thinking about what goals we want the website to accomplish, but not thinking about what we really want to get out of the experience. So before you get out your sketchpad and start making wireframes, think about what you personally want to achieve by building this website. Are you personally gaining some new skills to make you a better designer/developer/marketer? If the website is a complete failure, is there something you can look back on and say, “Well, at least I’m better at xyz” or, “I got to meet some cool people that might be able to help me later on.” Here are the goals for latest website project and some general guidelines to help you make yours.

This is a post in my Building a Website Series and Case Study. This is the third post explaining How to Develop a Website Strategy.

Personal Goals for my Site

My goals fall into three broad categories.

One, I want to learn and to improve as a WordPress developer and designer. I want to get more comfortable editing template files and going past just using WordPress for blogging purposes. That means adding and using custom post types and custom taxonomies to make it more of a generic CMS. As a designer I want be able to use this site as a living portfolio. I want to take the time to keep iterating on a design to make it continually better and better. Also, I wanted to work more on a formalized design process, which is what this series of post is all about.

Second, I wanted to learn how to ‘maintain’ as site. It’s all good and well to sell a design as being SEO friendly, but it’s another thing when your bottom line and true success comes from being able to produce top SERP rankings. SEO is such a broad field that often gets a bad rap from being so full of shysters. Monetization is also a vital part of maintaining a website. Testing and tracking and learning how to make a profit is what keeps the website going. Another aspect of maintaining a site is marketing, in my case social media marketing. This kind of ties into my third personal goal as well.

Third, I wanted to get more comfortable with a community. I’m not exactly and introvert, but definitely not an extrovert either. This is one area where I’m really going to have to push myself to get better at. I just want to learn how to better talk with strangers. To meet people from the community, tell them what I’m working on and see if I can help. For example, I know a good article for my site would be to feature a vendor at one of our several Farmer’s Market each week, but it is something I keep putting off. There are other reasons for wanting to build a community other than just to become less introverted. Being able to prove that you’ve fostered an online community is a great way to prove to someone who I’m trying to do social media consulting for that I know what I’m talking about. A community will also be very beneficial to monetizing the website.

Take Away Thoughts about Setting Personal Goals

Like the site goals, personal goals also should be written and reviewed on occasion. They should do things that ‘stretch‘ you beyond what you are comfortable with.

Don’t be afraid to list money-making as a personal goal. While it might not seem as noble to say you want to make money from your site, for a majority of us that is exactly why we are doing it. Sure there are other reasons why you are building ‘this’ particular site, and money might not (and really shouldn’t) be your main reason for building the site. But being able to generate money is a really good indicator of success. Would you rather have a site getting 10,000 unique visitors a month with $0 in monthly revenue or 100 uniques with $10,000 revenue? What site is more successful? What site is likely to stick around longer?

Your goals should make you a better coder/designer/marketer and all-around a better human. Should the site be a failure of epic proportions, you should walk away being just a little better than when you started.