Setting Milestones

Once you’ve crafted a mission statement, it’s time to make a list of milestones or goals for your site. Milestones usually have dates beside them, but at this point, it's more important to list them.

Divide your list into the things you need to accomplish by the time you launch your site, and longer-term goals that can be completed after the site has begun to attract users.

A short-term milestone list might look like this:

For the Web site launch:

1. A content management system that matches your needs.
2. 15 articles.
3. A newsletter signup box.
4. A photo gallery.
5. A discussion board.
6. A calendar of events.
7. A way to host advertising.
8. Traffic-tracking system.
9. Site search capability.
10. Printer-friendly Web pages.

After the launch, you might hope to:

1. Add a live chat module.
2. Produce an online media kit.
3. Link discussion board registration to newsletter signups.
4. Offer online billing.
5. Set up a Web store.
6. Create a version of your Web site that will work on PDAs and portable devices.
7. Set up online polls.
8. Install a feedback system.
9. Add an RSS feed to deliver updates to interested subscribers.
10. Automatically highlight terms linked to an online glossary.

Make sure your long-term list is accessible to everyone who works on the site and is easy to edit. If you feel particularly bold, share the list with your site’s readers and let them suggest what additional features they’d like to see. Capture suggestions and keep track of the relative frequency of requests.

It's important to make sure that your milestones serve your mission. You can pour a lot of effort and time into improving a site, but if you drift away from your core mission, you’ll confuse, or lose, your audience.