This is a pretty hefty list of things for your website to do. You probably need to be a little less ambitious with your website goals.

Let’s make things a bit easier. You should define one or more goals that are more manageable, specific and measurable (ever heard of SMART goals?)

What’s the role of your website? Is it:

• a brochure site, with pictures and info about your products? Do you send people to it to find out more about what you offer?
• there to inform or educate your readers?
• a blog or diary type of site, where you add regular updates on subjects related to your business?
• there to gather leads? Maybe you have customer surveys, or you exchange free info for email addresses, or twitter followers
• an e-commerce site? Do you sell your stuff online?

The structure and design of the website will be different for each of these and needs to support your small business website goal. Here’s an example. Which one of these is better defined, more manageable and easier to measure on your website:

1. Promote your small business, or

2. Gather relevant leads by collecting email addresses and phone numbers?

See what I mean?

It’s important to get the goals right for any website, even if you have 10,000 pages. For a small business website though, it’s even more important, because you have to carefully justify the time and resources that you spend on every single page.

Once your goal is defined, you can break it down into the steps that visitors can take to complete it. This will help you to define the role of each of the pages or sections. Are the pages there to educate? Do you want people to read them, then click through to read more information? Or do you want them to come back tomorrow to read your latest update? How about next week?

It’s traditional in web design to think in terms of visitors, bounce rates and funnels, but this thinking could be out of date for your site.

It might be better to think about the time spent on key pages, conversions, single page visits and repeat visitors.

Once you’ve defined your website goals(s) you’ll find it a lot easier to plan out your website, write it and promote it.

• can you describe what your website is for, and
• is it really designed to do it?

Or, is the goal of your website confused by fancy graphics, collections of (ir)relevant information, multi-colored text and visitor counters? Does this sound familiar? Spend a few minutes browsing through a few websites and you might see what I mean.

If you know a bit about web technology it’s easy to get distracted by what you CAN build instead of focusing on the goal of the site, who your visitors are and how you are going to get them to the goal. Even if you work with a web designer, you need to think about this. They will probably have a nice portfolio of clever stuff that they’ve created for other clients. But can they help you to achieve your goal?

My advice is to write down the purpose of the site. You should be able to write down one (or two or three) goals. Everything that you put into the site should steer people toward those goals.

If not, it might be time to start using the delete key…