Preparing your web : Website Purpose

The first important step (that is often neglected) in the website creation process, is to determine the purpose of your web site. Oftenly a website lacks the focus of a clear purpose and visitors are quickly confused and click away.

It's an established fact that Internet users today are increasingly impatient and intolerable. A website visitor will not spend their precious time trying to figure out what the site is about (or how it can benefit them). A website with a well defined purpose stands out and a visitor should instantly recognize it without effort.
Clearly defining the purpose of your website before its creation, will ensure that your website is optimized to achieve the required purpose. After all, you can only meet your goals when you know what they are.

For your part, you need to first focus and understand why you are having this website?
You might be trying to:

• provide a service
• sell a product
• present information on a topic
• make an announcement
• inform people about yourself
• create a forum that addresses a certain issue
• deliver news on a particular subject

You might even (quite commonly) be trying to perform a combination of the above things. If you are providing a service, you'll be providing marketing information and other related content. That's fine but understand the principal purpose of the site in this case is to provide a service.


Consider devoting a page to your site's purpose. Some sites do this through a mission statement or a dedicated page explaining the purpose of the site. It will effectively address why the site was created, what it's about and what it hopes to achieve for the user (site's goal). This is a very efficient method to combine two of your website's objectives.

You can research other site's statement's of purpose for ideas but remember only you can determine what the purpose of your own website is or is going to be. Understand the purpose and goals of your website are what get projected in search query results (i.e. asking a Search Engine to find you something you typed in). You have a brief window of opportunity to advertise the benefits your site will offer the potential visitor so this must convey the site's purpose (and benefits) effectively and efficiently.

Having a clearly defined purpose will benefit you also when it comes time to submit your website to directories. The Directory will ask you to provide a limited description of your website. You must be able to quote a purpose/benefit description effectively within two sentences; ideally in one sentence.Once your site is listed in the directory (and search engines for that matter), it's your website's purpose that people view. You must therefore be crystal clear about the purpose, leaving nothing to doubt. Visitors will quickly determine the relevancy of their interest on arrival at your website (if they get that far).

One last point, don't ever mislead or trick people thinking your site is something it's not. This is a counter-productive measure that could get your website barred from search engines and or directories.