When you’re planning your website, pretty much the most important thing is to write down what the purpose of the website will be. The purpose of a website is what you expect it to achieve for your business or product. Ultimately you’ll refine the purpose into quantifiable goals, but for starters a decently described purpose will stand you in good stead.

The purpose of a website might be to sell products, or to generate sales enquiries, or to provide information to a target market. The purpose might be specific – to allow people to book for an event. It might be broad – to allow people to find out about your services.

Whatever the purpose of the site is, it is the job of the designer, developer, copywriter, editor, administrator and SEO expert to help the site achieve this. Here’s a working example of how one site achieves one of its objectives:

The KZNSA Gallery and Upcoming Exhibitions

The new KZNSA Gallery website is now 4 months old (as of the beginning of August 2011). It’s doing wonderfully, and attracting more and more visitors.

One of the key purposes of the site is to provide notifications of upcoming and current exhibitions. To allow the site to do this successfully, we decided that on the Home page we’d need to display the current exhibition. During the project, this expanded to needing to display exhibitions, plural, and to display both upcoming and current exhibitions.

What we’ve landed up with is a slideshow feature on the Home page. It can display up to 6 exhibitions comfortably, and ultimately it keeps the site looking fresh week after week.

The Home page for 27th July 2011, displaying the 3 exhibitions then on show.

In the CMS we built a special editor to make updating the slideshow feature block easy and quick. Upcoming exhibitions are changed to Current exhibitions with a couple of clicks. Old exhibitions are removed, and new ones added with very little time or effort, and just a little bit of Photoshop skill.

The editor lets us add, edit, remove and re-order items in the slideshow feature.

It took some working together between the gallery staff, designer and coder to work out exactly what would suit them best in order to showcase their exhibitions, but the end result has made the gallery’s website both attractive and highly functional for their target audience. Purpose achieved!