Business on the web follows all the rules a real world business has, albeit a bit differently like in any real world business, your website would cater to your target audience. If it's a website for your business, you would like to focus on your customers and offer your suite of services like you would do in a real world Business.

In order to plan your business, every step is taken to ensure that you achieve the success that you seek. You plan your value offering, You fine tune your product offering, decide on pricing, develop a marketing strategy and define your deliverable.

On your online initiatives, the rules of the game are the same, just that the websites work for you even when you are not in your office. Websites work for you round the clock and that means that your customers might not get that personal attention that you might strive to give them.

It's of utmost importance that you lay the objectives before you start your build of the website. A successful online initiative requires careful planning and clear directions. You have to determine what are your achievable with the online initiatives. This should be given in the brief which would plan to give us for building your website.

Broadly the key objectives can be classified under the following heads:
a) Information dissemination
b) Selling products and Services
c) Customer support
d) Community building websites

It's not necessary that a website could be just be focused on a particular objective.

Some of the key factors which you should consider for developing a clear objectives are:

Image you would like to project
i.Who are your prospective visitors online.
ii.What would these visitors like to hear from you.
iii.What is the service you would like to offer to these visitors.
iv.What is the visual image you would like to project to your customers?
v.What are the factors which define your real world business brand image and how would you like to integrate your brand image into the online initiative?

Customer services
i.How would you service your customers?
ii.Your terms of services.
iii.Support policies [even if you are selling physical products on the website, you have to ensure that timely replies are sent out to the customers.] What are your key deliverable objectives on this count?

Launch of the website
i.Planned time frame for launch of the website.
ii.Marketing of the website.

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