Setting Site Goals

So you have finally have your website’s inspiration, now its time to move on to figure out how to make that dream become a reality. Goal setting is common to most every field in life because it forces us to define what ’success’ is. It gives us something concrete to look to at and to measure how our current efforts align to what we are doing. So naturally, it’s a good idea to some goals you want to achieve for your new website.

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

Site Goals for My Website

Most of my goals are more content related or not really quantifiable. I’m not sure if this is really a bad or not. I didn’t set any goals for things like monthly unique visitors or such because I really had no idea what a good goal for that would be. There weren’t any real competitors in my space to try to set traffic goals like that. My goals really are more like ambitions; things I’m striving for; the general direction I want my site to go.

Upon going over these again, and since the site has been live for over a month now, I really should add some more quantifiable goals to obtain. I need to add goals for things that I can control like having a page for every park in the county on my site and for things that I can’t necessarily control like having the major of a city tweet about an article on my site.

Take Away Thoughts about Setting Site Goals

Setting goals can be a tricky thing. You don’t want to set the bar to low so that achieving it is effortless, but you also don’t want to set the bar so high that it cannot feasible be achieved. I think an important attribute to add to your goals is to set a time. Have some goals that you want to achieve this month, have some that you want to achieve in 6 months and have some that are on your all-time list.

Another thing about goals is to write them down and review them. Reaffirm these goals frequently and when big decisions have to be made, reference your site goals.

After you have determined what you would like for your site to accomplish, it’s to move forward and figure out what you personally would like to accomplish with your new website by setting some personal goals.