Every once in a while, it’s important to step back and evaluate how you are doing when it comes to the fundamentals of your field or industry. Because my field is Internet marketing and websites, I came up with 10 questions you can ask yourself to determine how well your site and online strategy are working.

10 Website Questions

1. What kind of Web presence do I need?

   Don’t worry too much about what kind of web presence you have just yet. Think carefully about what kind of presence you really need. Do you need an informational site, an e-commerce platform, or a community or network site? Which suits your business best?

2. What does my website need to accomplish?

   Is your site primarily meant to distribute information? Sell a product? Get subscribers? What are the end results you need to achieve?

3. Who do I want to visit my site?

   Think about your ideal audience. Are they tech-lingo-speaking engineers? C-suite managers? Teenage girls with generous spending habits? Do you need to serve more than one audience? How will you serve multiple audiences? Some reading about personas might help at this point.

4. Who is visiting my site?

   Do you really know who is visiting your site? This can be tricky to determine, but there are clues to who it is that is viewing your site. A web analytics package will go a long way in helping you to determine what content and which calls to action are resonating with your current audience. You can also ask your visitors directly—a short, online survey can do a lot to help unveil your visitors’ feelings and background.

5. How will I drive traffic to my site?

   There are many methods for driving traffic, and you need to figure out which will be most appropriate for your site and which are the highest priority. Natural search engine results? Pay-per-click ads? Viral, word-of-mouth marketing? Links from related sites? Press releases?

6. What is it that I want my visitors to do or learn?

   These actions are the baby steps towards achieving your main purpose in #2 above. Do you want your visitors to read a certain page, download a whitepaper, and then contact sales? Do you want them to read product reviews, look at a photo gallery, add a product to their cart, and check out? What are the most important actions that lead to achieving your goals?

7. How can I engage my visitors?

   Often the problem with a site is not getting visitors to come to a site, but making them stay. How can you connect with your audience and encourage them to stick around? What (small) set of calls to action are going to be used to motivate your visitors to explore, learn, and enjoy your site?

8. How can I increase repeat visits?

   How do you make a website “sticky?” Is your site a one-trick pony? Does your site have more to offer visitors at a later date?

9. How will my website be built and managed? In-house or outsourced?

   Once you’ve determined what your site needs to be, you need to think about how it will be built and maintained. Remember, it’s often the case that whatever site and system you have now is a sunk cost and therefore shouldn’t unduly influence your decision about what to do going forward.

10. What kind of website can I afford?

    Once you know what you need and want, you have to look at what you realistically can have, at least in the near term. You may have to prioritize your goals and simply try to accomplish as much as you can with your limited resources.

More Than 10 Answers

These 10 basic website questions don’t have perfect, unchanging answers, even for the same company at two different times. The best answer often changes with growth or challenges your company is facing. Each question is also open-ended, so there are multiple answers to each one. The main point is simply to think about what’s important regularly so that your company or site follows its optimal path on the web.

To create a successful site, you must find a need and then fill it. Tabeze is trying to do just that when it comes to domain name research.

One of the basic problems of many domain name research tools is the time it takes to determine whether or not each domain is already registered or not. Another is that it can be hard to brainstorm because it is hard to keep track of your past ideas and use them for inspiration.

Tabeze Changes How Domain Name Research Is Done…

Tabeze is basically an AJAX domain name research tool. It allows you to create as many “tabs,” or domain name searchers, as you’d like. Each tab allows you to determine whether or not a domain name is registered. You can use as many tabs at a time as you’d like—I can’t usually type fast enough to use more than 4 or 5 at once. When you get a result you’d like to keep, just leave it on the page and open up another tab. It’s really cool to be able to research multiple domain names simultaneously and to be able to see all my searches on one page.

…But Has a Few Kinks to Work Out

I had problems with the page occasionally locking up if I had too many tabs running queries. That was frustrating because I have to copy down all the research I’ve done so far and reload the page. I lose the ability, unless I re-query all the previous domain names, of seeing all the research I’ve done on one page.

One feature that I really, really wanted was the ability to reorganize the tabs—I kept wanting to click and drag the tabs to reorganize them and group them into related sets. Grouping ideas is one of the best roads to great brainstorming, and I missed the ability to do that. The other feature I wanted was to query multiple domain-name extensions at once and view the results in a table or list that would normally be hidden but would appear when I hover over or click on a tab.

Tabeze Needs to Grow Up

Well done, Tabeze, finding a need and doing a pretty good job of filling it. Please, please fix the connection problems I run into sometimes and add a few features to make domain name research much easier and snappier. If the server didn’t crash, I’d use Tabeze, with or without new features. Until then, I have to stick with the Network Solutions domain name research tool.