In my previous blog post I made the point that clarifying the goals that you have for your website is an essential step in making sure the website you create is a success.
It is also important to be aware that the goals you want to achieve with your website are sometimes different from the goals of your visitors.
If you keep your visitors happy they will be more likely to browse your page for longer and hopefully decide to take the action that fulfills your goal as the website owner.
For instance, a common website goal is to collect names for a mailing list. This is not usually on the top of most visitors list of things to do so to achieve this goal we can take an educated guess as to what might the visitors goal might be.
Going back to the example I used in my previous post for site advertising a festival, you (as the festival organizer) may want to build up a mailing list of interested people that you can contact about future events. However perhaps your visitor only wants to find out when their favorite band is playing at the next festival.
To reconcile these goals you could offer a downloadable program which will give the visitor the information they are looking for. This information will probably not be available until close to the event so you can give the user the option to enter their email address so they can receive the program via email when it is available – which also adds the email address to the mailing list.
This fulfills the visitor and the website owners goals at the same time so everyone is happy.
To maximize your chances of making your website visitors happy, try taking some time to think about all the possible goals that your visitor might have other than your own goals for the website.
If you or your web designer can think of a way of combining the action that achieve your visitors goals with the action that achieves your own goals you are much more likely to create a successful website.