may be critical to get more customers to finish the sales process, so the sixth item might

be most important. In addition, the first objective directly contributes to the second, third,

and potentially fourth and fifth, so that would also be the primary objective. After consid-

eration, our primary goals might look like this:

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WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES

1. Make the website standards compliant by using semantic markup and CSS-based

design. Construct the site with valid XHTML.

2. Halve the number of steps in the shopping cart checkout process.

Secondary objectives

When it comes to a corporate website, there are many vested interests, and one person’s

top priority is another person’s afterthought. Web developers often find themselves medi-

ators between divided parties. Take advantage of your secondary objectives list to appease

disgruntled marketing folk, because these objectives should receive attention during the

redesign process, and are likely to be implemented.

Looking at our preceding list, and after huddling with different team members, we might

identify secondary objectives as the following:

1. Reduce the average page weight by half to decrease load time.

2. Make the website more accessible by complying with WCAG 1.0 Priority Level 1

guidelines.

By making the site standards compliant from the outset, reducing the page weight will be

a given and you’ll already be halfway done with accessibility efforts, since standards com-

pliance and accessibility overlap in quite a few areas.

3. Create consistency in the site’s navigation by replacing the current disparate menus

with a collective drop-down menu.

The director of marketing, for example, not being tech-savvy, may have a hard time find-

ing his way around the site and will want to see a much improved navigation. A lead

designer and information architect will also see considerable room for improvement and

mark this as a very important secondary objective.

4. Add a corporate blog written by the CEO.