10 years ago i started building website, what started as a hobby and fascination turned into a healthy source of income. I put myself through design school by designing websites and the education i received allowed me to look at websites from a psychological and strategic point of view.

It is not an easy task to sell strategy with a website design pitch. Price wise is much higher and graphically it might not make much difference but of course the results are like night and day. I have a very solid track record that i'm very proud of, i have never worked on a web project that included strategy and failed!

so when i talk about web strategy in construction phase, what do i mean?

3 Strategic Elements every site should have

• Characteristics
  
• Objectives with Benefits
  
• Focus

If you research any of the successful website you will all of the above elements in them. Similarly if you'd like to know if a project is going to fail or not all you have to do is to figure out if the above elements are available or not.

Characteristics

Content and softwares are soulless. They are just a piece of information laid out on an even more soulless canvas. Content by itself is not attractive, but we can give it a zing by giving it a little bit of attention. Content represents the voice of the author, therefore to give content soul we must setup our writing guidelines to have more personal voice embedded into our content.

Some of the blogs that you read constantly and love use the personal voice to give their content soul. When you read these blogs you can imagine the writer writing them, that's very powerful.

The design of the website should also reflect you, the owner of the site. The worst thing a designer can do to his/her client is to make any project a personal and self reflective project. If you are designing a blog for another blogger try to understand who he/she is and try to deign it to reflect them simply because they are going to be the writers of that blog and if the soul of the content doesn't match the design of the site then people wouldn't be able to trust the writer right away. This is probably the biggest reason why i suggest to every client to stay away form already design templates. Worst case scenario, if they like to go with a template try to convince them to at least customize the color to reflect their personality.

Objective with Benefits

People don't buy Concepts, they buy Benefits!

If your site doesn't offer benefits to people then there isn't much reason for them to visit your site. at the same time if your site only offers one benefit that they can take at anytime then people don't have another reason to visit your site again!

Benefits are the very reason people build loyalty to any site. They are also give your site value. So you want to strategize your site to offer benefits as constantly and as frequently as possible. The more benefits you give out the more loyal people will become and the faster you will grow.

for blogs, benefits are as simple as writing "How to" Tutorial articles, for example, how to build a logo with photoshop, or How to save money, or How to fix a car. How To's are just one example, Tip, Tricks, Secrets, Special Offers, and educational articles also serve a lot of benefits people appreciate as well.

Focus

Focus is hard to achieve, and even harder to maintain. Focus is knowing what your site is about and maintaining the same Niche Market focus everyday and every year!

It is hard, i admit, how much can you write about the same topic over and over again and not just worry about running out of ideas but also worry about boring the hell out of the audience.  To avoid boring people keep revisiting the soul of your content, also revisit my Branding Article. When Choosing a Niche Topic you're actually choosing a Niche Target Market. Target market has to be big enough to make business sense but not too big and broad that it wouldn't stick. Also it is a great idea to have multiple Niche blogs to avoid boredom for yourself as well.

so before you start yet another blog, rethink why you want to start it, if it is going to be a hobby are you willing to keep it a hobby but if not