Company Name *
Do you own a domain name; if so list the domain name(s) that would be associated with the website.
Do you have a relationship with a hosting provider if so please provide the company name and the plan you are under.
What type of business are you in?
Why are you creating this website and what are your objectives for it?
What outcome will make this website successful and how will you measure that?
What are the most frequent complaints you receive from customers about your business?
Why do people do business with you? What makes you, your products, or your service stand out?
Is your audience primarily other businesses, consumers, vendors or employees or something else? If you need to serve more than one of these groups, you could have a site that has a section for each of them or you could have four sites that each serves only one of them.
Describe this website’s target audience. (e.g. age, lifestyle, ethnicity, etc.) There may be multiple target audiences, so describe each one.
Do your current and potential customers already use the internet to learn about or make purchases from businesses like yours?
What is the single most important thing that you want the audience to know about your business?
For each target audience, describe what you think they want to get out of your website?
What are your goals regarding each target audience that visits the site?
What is the most compelling thing that we want the target user to think after they experience the website?
What words describe your organization? Be as descriptive as possible. Do you think of a color, car, animal, plant, or anything else when you think about your business? Not to be corny, but ask yourself questions like ‘if my business were a car, what type of car would it be?’ Every piece of insight here can help your designer.
Do you have existing ‘brand’ collateral such as logo, colors, style guides?
If you have ‘brand’ collateral and will not be redesigning it, do you have your logo and other assets in a digital format?
Do you have a tagline? If yes, is it always associated with your logo or do you sometimes display your logo without it?
What do your current customers think about your business, “brand”, products, and current website, if applicable?
What websites or other businesses compete for your customer’s attention?
Of the websites that you list in the previous question, which one do you think is the best in regard to the overall ‘look and feel’ or design? Rank the rest of the sites from best to worst with regard to design.
Are there any features or functionality on your competitors’ websites that you want to incorporate into your website?
What do your competitors do on their websites that you feel is effective in getting or retaining customers?
What type of online or offline marketing are your competitors doing?
Of any websites in any category, list the websites that you like the best in regards to design.
Website content consists of text, pictures, video, etc. Where will your website content come from? Does it exist or will it need to be created? If it needs to be created, do you have a copywriter that will do this?
What type of content do you have and what format is it in? For example, you may have text in Word documents, videos on videotape, audio as MP3s, and photos as prints. In this example, the photos would have to be scanned and turning into a digital format before they could be used on the website.
How often will content be changed, updated, or added? This could be job openings, events, press releases, product updates, etc.
Do you need to display your text in other languages like Spanish, French, Korean, etc? If so, which languages?
If it were possible, would you like the ability to update and maintain your site content? If so, do you have multiple levels of users such as read-only, editor, translator, or manager for publishing approval?
Your site may consist of pages like About Us, Portfolio, News, etc. What sections and what pages have you contemplated for your site?
What type of information, if any, would you like to capture from your visitors?
What is your total marketing budget? How much of that is reserved for online marketing?
What is your average sale? If you sell online currently, is your average online sale different than your average offline sale and if so, how much is the average sale of each worth?
What type of information or reporting would you like to see from your website?
Will you display text or banner ads on your site? Will the ads be your own cross-promotional ads or will they be third party ads?
Do you need community-building features such as social media, chat, or bulletin board?
Do you need a specialized contact form? If so, what information do you need to collect?
Do you want an Email-a-Friend function? This would allow your customer to do word-of-mouth marketing for you.
Do you have affiliates, dealers, or multiple stores? Do you need a function that allows the users to search for an affiliate, dealer, or store near them?
Do you now run or would you like to run an email newsletter or email marketing campaign?
Do you want an area where you can publish your news articles and press releases?
Do you need site personalization, which lets the user select the content that is most important to them and then displays it to one page? This could be as simple as displaying a line that says ‘Welcome back, Joe” to more advanced applications like a stock broker allowing the user to create a page that tracks the stocks the user selects.
Do you ever need to share files like PDFs or Word documents with your customers or employees? Do they need to share files with you? This is a great feature that allows an employee to download the latest health insurance form or it allows your customer to download the latest operating manual for one of your products.
Do you have a lot of content? Would a search function help the user find what they are looking for?
Do you want to publish your events or calendar on your site? Do you want to automatically send reminders of those events via email?
Do you need to create specialized data entry forms from time to time?
Do you want to sell your products or services directly on the site without pre approving users?
If you do not sell directly on your site, but want to display a product/service catalog, do you need a request-for-quotation application? Essentially, this is a shopping cart, but instead of processing an order it submits the request to your sales team.
Please describe your shipping and taxation processes.
Do you want your customers to have a “my account” section where they can do things like check on their order status, update their account information, and keep a wish list?
Do you offer any products, services, or subscriptions that require a recurring billing? What is the recurrence period – monthly, quarterly, something else?
What other features or functions do you want the site to have? What business functions or processes would you like automate?
Are there any functions or features on any website that you know of, that you think are interesting in any regards?
Additional Notes/Comments
