What is the Purpose of Creating a Website?
Let us start at the absolute foundation of building a web presence: Why?
Why are you expending time, energy, and resources to build a website and deploy it to the internet? Obviously, you want other people to see these pages. You are attempting to communicate, through your web pages, a specific message to a specific audience. Ideally, you should be able to sum up this purpose in a single, succinct tag line. In our work here, our tag line is: “The Fundamentals of Professional Web Sites.”
Before writing code, define the core variables of your project:
- What is your core message?
- Who is the specific audience you are addressing?
This is not an academic exercise; it is the blueprint of your system. The answers here determine every technical choice that follows—from formatting and page structure to navigation systems and SEO strategies.
A website is a tool to communicate a message to a target audience. The purpose defines the tool; the tool must never define the purpose.
An architect cannot design a building without knowing how it will be used and by whom. Once you clearly and succinctly know the purpose of your site, you can plan what you need to build it. You can determine the right technologies for the job, select reasonable fallbacks, and understand which constraints are non-negotiable. Define your message and your audience first, and the execution details follow logically.