When Charles Lindbergh undertook his historic flight across the Atlantic, he was armed with no more than a compass to guide his way, and the success of his plan was measured simply by whether or not he survived the journey. Lindbergh got the job done, but soon after, aviators began concentrating on getting the job done right-- using avionics, navigational equipment, radar, GPS, and collision avoidance systems. Until recently, many companies pursued web development in much the same way that early pilots approached crossing the Atlantic-- just trying to make it to the other side alive. If you're still trying to navigate the stormy waters of online ventures by dead reckoning, it's probably time you started thinking about developing a web strategy.

Biz Dev Meets the Web

The first step in developing a web strategy is to isolate goals for your online property and ensure that these map over to the larger business goals of the company. Your director of business development should already have the business goals established. Your job is to decide how your Web strategy will address these goals and how you will measure the success of your strategy.

The initial draft of a Web strategy should present:

• a direct or at the very least indirect correspondence between the Web strategy and specific business goals. If your company's main goal in the coming quarter is to increase revenue, how will a plan to develop new editorial content address that goal?



• a high level road map of strategy components. These components should be developed in some detail, but in the initial planning stages, broadly defined elements should suffice.



• demonstrable benchmarks, such as projected page views, revenue, mailing list subscriptions and other measurable data.

As an example, let's examine the web strategy of a company that sells coffee tables and has a peripheral online property. For the upcoming quarter the company plans on expanding into the bar stool market, and overall business goals include repositioning the company brand and increasing revenue.

A Web strategy designed to address these dual business goals might include elements such as developing new content related to both bar stools and the new corporate brand, restructuring the site's architecture or implementing a multi-phased re-design, adding new e-commerce components and selling additional advertising space. Besides setting benchmarks for projected revenue, one of the strategy components might be a user survey conducted that would generate data on brand perception and the relative success of the strategy's brand repositioning efforts.

While developing your short term and long-term web strategy, don't forget to:

• Undertake a competitive analysis before formalizing any large scale implementation



• Stay informed on future business goals and how they may affect the scalability of your current strategy



• Talk to your business director about future partnerships or third party relationships that could facilitate the implementation of your strategy



• Plan ahead for the integration of offline and online data