Step 1: Determine Website’s North Star

Before truly starting the process to create or redesign a website, you need to determine the website’s “north star.” The north star is what you and your team will use throughout the website development process to determine if the decisions you are making are taking your project in the right direction.

Defining a north star early in the process helps get your stakeholders and project team on the same page. Your north star should be agreed to by both parties and recorded for accountability later in the project.

As you continue through the creation of your website, take time periodically to refer back to your north star to make sure you are on track to meet your goals. These predefined goalposts help you make decisions based on your shared desires, not personal preferences, and can be an excellent way to prioritize competing needs.

Identify Your Primary Audience

Perhaps the most important element of your north star is defining your audience, especially your primary audience. Importantly, “everyone” can’t be your primary audience.

While it is true that your website may have multiple audiences, you still need to define them and prioritize them. The primary audience will guide your decision making as you make key decisions about information architecture, navigation and content.

It is also important to note that your stakeholders may not be your primary audience — in fact, it’s likely that they aren’t. Identifying this early in the planning process will help you make organizational decisions based on what will help the website meet business goals by focusing on making the right information available to the right people in a way that makes sense to them.

Identify Your Primary Goals

Hand-in-hand with identifying your primary audience is identifying your site’s primary goals. These are the objectives that you are hoping your website will help your audience achieve.

Your site can have multiple goals, but they do need to be prioritized. It’s also possible that you’ll have different goals for different audience segments. Having multiple objectives is not an issue, but you do need to clearly choose your primary 1-3 goals to help your team make decisions about information architecture, navigation and content.

Define Trackable Events

If you want to measure the success of your website, you’ll need to define trackable events early. (A trackable event is something that can be observed and recorded by website analytics.)

Typically you want to define a trackable event for each primary goal in order to track success. For example, if your site’s primary goal was to increase applications to a college or school, you might track how many times a button labeled “learn how to apply” was clicked.

Please note that many trackable events are only trackable if they are set up using a tool like Google Tag Manager. This means that you must decide on these measurements and set them up to be tracked prior to your site going live if you want to collect any data.