Many people come to designers with online businesses in mind. Building a blog, an online shopping site, an empire. Most of the questions I hear are all about logistics and tactical decisions, like which shopping cart? WordPress or Joomla? How do you host the images? And so on.
I can tell you all about how WordPress works, or what image format will save you the most server space. But the thing is, none of it really matters. You can have the best website in the world, but if you don’t have a clear vision for what you want to do with it, no one will care. You can have a super-optimized business model, but if no one wants to buy what you’re selling, you don’t have a business.
You can learn all about tactics as you go along, but you need to have a clear strategy to begin with.
It’s only after you have a clear strategy, can you go back to work on the tactics. Starting with tactics first is one of the easiest ways to get screwed in the long run. This is applicable in all aspects of life, and ties back to everything we learnt about branding; Vision, mission, objectives. I think it’s the same thing really.
There was only ONE client that told me about his strategy; what he wanted his business to be all about, who he wanted to target, why he knew it would work, what he knew he would accomplish with it. He didn’t care about HOW it was going to be done, he just knew this was what he needed to accomplish.
He showed me the big picture, and let me go about creating smaller pictures that I thought would best work to achieve his bigger picture.
And he wasn’t worried about people copying his idea either. Because without the proper strategy or vision, they will only succeed in copying his tactics, and will only see a fraction of his success. This is another reason why, with proper strategy and branding in place, you don’t need to worry much about competition!
dot com crash says selling stuff online that is already sold easily offline is a good way to fail
awesomely said. haha. at the end of the day it’s still about the product, not the look.