You may have a clear vision of your website or app, but it can be very challenging to try to communicate that vision to the team who will make it a reality.

• Target Audience

This is the first question and one of the most important. The target audience can be a combination of internal (employees, management team, marketing staff…) and external (current and potential customers, competitors, suppliers…) parties. Once you know your audience you have to determine the reasons why each different type of user will visit your site or app.

• Your Goals 

After you have determined who your visitors are, and why they are visiting your website, you can determine your site’s primary goals and requirements (e.g. brand awareness, ecommerce, communication, entertainment, intranet, extranet…). I advise you to prepare a detailed SOW to clearly identify the goals, constraints, and success criteria for the project.

• Determine a budget

A number of factors must be considered and jus to name a few you can:  include domain name registration (you can buy more than one domain), hosting (consider cloud services), hardware, content management (consider open source), site maintenance, integration with current applications (e.g. ERP, CRM…), branding (look & feel), marketing (e.g. SEM, SEO, SMO. offline activities), ecommerce (a whole project itself).