How to Find Your Website’s Purpose (And Why You Should Bother)

By Joshua on April 15 2008

Photo by a VeCeS Veo… (license)

Last week I talked about how a website's content is more important than its design. The point of a design is to support the website's content. But how can you tell if the content itself is doing it's job? You have to know what your website's purpose is.

Now, you may be thinking to yourself, "Duh! Of course you need to know your website's purpose!" But even if you have some idea of your website's purpose, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a very clear idea.

This all leads me to my main point. If you don't have a clear idea of what your website's purpose is, you have know way to tell whether it's working or not.

How to figure out your website's purpose

1. List the things you want your website to do for you

For most websites, there will be more than one goal that your website helps you accomplish. ( Such as providing product information to potential buyers, as well as providing post-sales support information.) Some are more important than others, but right now, your job is just to list them all.

2. Distinguish between goals and means

After you've created your list, look over it carefully. You'll probably find that it's actually a combination of goals and methods. So, for instance, "convince people to give me money" might be a goal, and "positioning myself as a well-known expert on the plight of unemployed Fortran coders" a means. (The line between them, of course, can be a bit fuzzy.)

Go through the list, keeping this distinction in mind, and mark each item as either a goal or a means.

3. Rank the goals

Now, looking at your collection of goals for your website, you'll need to rank them from most important to least important. If you have a hard time ranking them, just compare two at a time and ask yourself, "If someone held a gun to my head and forced me to choose just one of these, which one would it be?"

By the end of this process, you should have a pretty clear idea of which goal is your website's primary purpose, and which are just secondary.

Often, just going through this exercise and figuring out will help to clarify your thinking about your website. But save your list (of both goals and means) because it will be useful in going through my next blog entry on using your list of goals to evaluate your website's content.