A website is the strongest part of any organization's overall digital marketing strategy. There are many design considerations when building out a website, but here is a list of the top 10 considerations presentated by Dallas Partners. 

1. Purpose. First ask :"Why are we building this website?" Websites can be more than a pretty online brochure. They can do things. The purpose can be as simple as "creating awareness"  to as  something more complex like "act as a lead generation tool to increase sales of our flagship product". Before a website is built, take the internal goals and define tangible objectives you will want to meet. Weather it's increase hits/conversions by 20%, increased awarness in 20-30 year olds, or damage control of incident X, find a metric that is obtainable and build toward it.
   
   
2. Measure Success (Analytics): Identify the proper analytics tool to use that will be the best measure of success. Web analytics are great for website visits, but consider using social media analytics tools, ad analytics, video analytics, mobile analytics, and others. The results of a successful web project include the ability to to assign a value to each visitor in order to calculate the ROI for the project. NOTE: Google Analytics is the gold standard and it's free. If it isn't currently implimentated, we strongly recommend installing it immediatly.
   
   
3. Audience: Know who you are talking to. More importantly, ask "who do we want to talk to?" A design should speak to the right age group, interest group or preople from a speficic region. If the audience is too broad, consider building multiple web properties to speak to each group. Now is the time to perform customer interviews, host focus groups, and to get candid feedback about what is working and what needs improvement.
   
   
4. Competition: Research what your competitors are doing and differentiate your message. Make sure you will not be out flanked by your competition. If you can, find out what works for them and do it better. Remember, a good website is not intended to last forever. It should be flexible and it's OK to change it up as you go. 
   
   
5. Call to Action: Based on the first four points, formulate a call-to-action (CTA). The idea is to turn visitors into leads and leads into customers. The CTA should be on every page. Identify at least one function and drive your site visitors to do it. Each time a user completes the CTA, that user is counted as a conversion. By taking the conversion number and dividing by the number of visitors, you can calculate the conversion ratio. For example, if you are selling something then the call-to-action should always be asking the user to close on the sale.  The simplest call-to-action is a contact form. 
   
   
6. Keep it Simple: A great site is simple to use and is easy to understand. Unless you are selling high-end art work to an eclectic crowd, don't use an over the top artsy design with hidden navigation or a site made 100% from flash. The average user spends less than two minutes on your website.  Help them get to what they need, quickly. 
   
   
7. Existing Marketing: Match the website design to the existing marketing material. Use the Style Guide if one has been developed. A good website should fit into the overall marketing and brand strategy of the company. It should be identifyable and similar to existing print media and advertising medium. This may be a good opportunity to freshen up all other marketing material to ensure a cohesive style and message.
   
   
8. Medium: Webstie traffic is increasingly coming from Mobile sources. By the end of 2012, over 50% of traffic will be from smart phones and tablets. Eventually most traffic will come from mobile devices. The website is evolving. The design should always scale for computers, phones, and tablets. 
   
   
9. Get Social: Social media deserves it's own top ten list. Social media Integration is becomeing a requirement. Use the tools to not only ask site visitors to like a page or follow site updates, but consider pushing content to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, foursquare, Google+., etc. automatically. The webstie is the core of an online strategy but by leveraging popular social platforms, website content can reach users where they surf the most and increase impact expotentially.
   
   
10. Execution: Doing it right. Dallas Partners' prides it's self on creating brilliant web strategies, technical project plans and then executing on those plans. Planning is essential, but without a great team to execute, a project may fall short.