Your next amazing idea doesn’t need to be a big project with a ton of investment. Sometimes people jump directly to the website building part of their next big venture, when really that’s more like a mid-point. You can build an amazing website that costs thousands of dollars and looks pretty, but if it doesn’t attract any users or doesn’t convert, you’ve wasted your time and money.

Have a plan.

People skip the planning stage too often. It’s hard work and they don’t want to do it. They just want to jump right in. A plan doesn’t need to be some 30 page business plan, but it should fill a certain amount of criteria. It also doesn’t have to be that detailed. It should answer the 5WH criteria at least:

• Who is my target market? Figuring out your target market can be hard sometimes. I can’t believe how many people I talk to who say their target market is ‘everyone.’ It’s never ‘everyone.’ If you’re working on a non-profit website and looking for donors, your market is probably people with above-average income in your local area. If you’re looking to sell houses, it’s probably recently married women. Know your product’s market. It will save you a ton of time in the long run, because you can build and test accordingly.
• What are my goals? If you don’t know your goals out of the gate, you won’t be focused. Every decision you make for your project needs to work towards those goals. Many people say they need to be clear cut and finite. I disagree. A goal can be as simple as: create awareness. Don’t get me wrong, finite goals make it easier to convey you vision if multiple people are involved, because there is a finish line.
• When do we cut our losses? This is really important. You need to set a negative option goal for yourself to have a clear cut idea of when to get out. If you don’t you can potentially waste a ton of time and energy on a project because you’re passionate about it. Know when to cut your losses and stick to your plan if things don’t work out. Unlike goals, this is where you NEED to be specific. For example: if I don’t make more than $1,000 per month in 6 months, we’re pulling the plug.
• Where can this project benefit other projects? Cross pollination of projects is essential at creating efficiency in your life. There is no such thing as separating different jobs or home and work. You’ll always be thinking about something work related at home and vice versa. Embrace that and make sure that when you’re creating efficiencies, that you’re taking all facets of your life into account. If you’re working on a blog project on Monday and a shopping cart project Wednesday, but both need mailing list software, why not use a package that benefits both? Always have efficiencies of scale in mind.
• Why am I doing this? This should be an easy question, but it’s answer should always point in the direction of your life goals. This will be your motivation.
• How will I fuel this project (time, money, passions, etc.)? This is really where you decide IF you can do something. You need to make sure that you have the TIME and MONEY to venture into something. If you don’t it will probably fail. Don’t stretch yourself too thin either. I’m guilty of that quite often. Make sure you can scale your projects adequately.

Test your market before you go big. Grow incrementally.

Before you invest a ton of resources in a project, test it out on a small scale. If you’re trying to sell things in a shopping cart, just go with the default template for a few weeks before you pay $5,000 for a custom template. Unless what you’re doing is based around a custom designed functionality and is completely new to the market, you should be able to test things cheap.

This also applies to things like pay per click (PPC) campaigns, list building campaigns, blogging, the service industry, and a slew of other things.

I started a similar project with my hosting business. We started with a desktop machine in my basement and were able to grow it incrementally until we had a cluster of servers co-located with Rackspace. You should be able to do the same with whatever venture you’re thinking of working on.

Build features and content. Design can come later.

People on the Internet are trying to scratch an itch. They’re looking to buy something or consume content. For the most part, people don’t care about the design of a site if the content and features are rich and useful.

Don’t get me wrong; building a website that looks nice will help people convert too, but he general idea is that they’re looking for products and services before they’re looking for a ‘pretty’ site. When trying to decide whether to spend $1000 on a logo or additional search features, consider which one your users will appreciate more.

I prefer to build projects that run themselves first and then make them look pretty later. I prefer to make my income as passive as possible. That usually means drop shipping product and automating the process of purchase orders between your cart and vendors, and sometimes that means hiring out portions of the work to a third party.

If your redesign looks better than the original, launch it.

All too often, I’m working on a redesign for a customer that is light years better than their original website before it’s done.  That happens in the first third of the project.  If they don’t observe this rule, the other two thirds of the project can be spent knit picking at the details – delaying the launch.  That’s really tragic when you launch the website and do A/B testing and remove all of the little changes they added anyways.  Just because a design isn’t perfect, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use it right now.

In this same vein, but a little off topic: if you are doing a redesign, don’t add functionality at the same time.  It can be confusing and time consuming.  Do your feature adds at a different time than your design change.  It makes the whole project much less convoluted.

Look at the big picture and go.

Once you’ve built a functional website and then moved on to design, start saving your resources for the next big (but incremental upgrade), but only if it fits the big picture of what you’re trying to do. You don’t need to build a million dollar website out of the gate. There are a ton of websites out there that just grew with their user base. Some of them still have horrible designs too. Look at Craig’s List. It looks horrible, but gets the job done. Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, and a ton of the other big ones didn’t start big, but that’s where they are now.

What are your thoughts?

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: The Smart Way to Start a Project