I have spent many years building websites and creating scope documents, business documents and technical requirement documents for websites for all types of companies.  Smaller companies only doing a million or two in revenue and others for companies doing billions of dollars a year in revenue.  I have worked with ecommerce applications embedded in websites where every business unit has a need for a share of the website and for companies where the website was the company.  Here is my favorite ways to think of a website that keeps the focus of the website in check.

 

1.     The website should always be there to support the company.  Whether the website has many different business units all ensuring that their portion of the website aligns with company goals or the website is the company and does not have to share real estate with different business units, everything on the website has to support the core goals, especially those things on the first page.

 

2.     The amount of space applied on the website is proportionate to the importance of the goal that is being served.  While different business units are part of the same company and have the same company goal they may serve that goal all having their own independent goals.  This creates warring groups all wanting to control the website.  The answer of who gets what space on the first page of the website lies in the goals of the company.  If you look at each page of the website as Real Estate, then how you can split up everyone’s needs so the real estate and its location is equal to the business units serving of the company goals.

example: Sales is usually the most important thing to a company, so the business units that make sales usually get a large part of prime real estate on the home page.  Marketing supports sales so marketing usually then gets the next largest portion of space.  Careers are important, but can be served in smaller amounts of real estate and a larger section of web space all linked from a small amount of space on the home page.
 

3.     The "Headlines"/"Teasers"/"Labels"/"Functionality" on the first page should start to help the website visitor ensure that they have found a relevant page and each click from that page on should get the visitor closer to the answer or closer to their goal.  The first page can be the home page of your site or a landing page.