The Process Explained

The following steps provide a starting point for building customer centric web site. While the concepts used here will seem very obvious, the practice is not used nearly as often as it should be. It is important to note that this is a brainstorming exercise, there is no wrong answers. It seems simple, yet when you look around, very few web sites are actually built this way. 

1. Define Success:
   Regardless how your measure it, write down the objective and be sure to make it a tangible quantifiable goal. Number visitors, visitor to buyer conversions and gross sales are all easy to measure objectives.
2. Identify Your Target Audience:
   List all the "types" of visitors your web site will have. Build a short profile for each with a focus on how that particular visitor type will contribute to meeting your defined objectives.
3. Identify Audience Questions:
   For each "type" list all the questions they might be visiting your site to answer. Best to something like post-it notes for this, you will see why in the next step.
4. Answer the Questions:
   Organize the questions into groups and answer each of them. Be sure to write down each answer and consolidate questions/answers were possible.
5. Build Navigation Title:
   With the answers at hand, you have a basis for building a structure based on your customers needs. Now take the answers and give each a short title concise title, the end goal being that these will be used for the site's navigation links.
6. Consider the Technology:
   The technology available to your customers, based on your profile in step #2, browser version, bandwidth, O/S and platform, their computer's overall age and screen size as well as their own technical proficiency, all play a role. Care should also be taken to consider alternate platforms like PDAs and cellphones, but of course that depends heavily on your potential client base. The end result of this step should be determining the limitations of the technology you should use. Just because you can, does not mean you should...
7. Define Guidelines & Standards:
   Overall Look & Feel of the site, color palette and consistent branding are key. If you already have a logo, print work, signage or any identifiable brand identity, you will want to ensure leverage its existing value. Consistent branding across all media forms enhances the value of each. 
8. Build the Site:
   According to the technical limitations of your target audience, their questions, the answers and newly defined guidelines and standards, build out the web site.
9. Human Factor Testing:
   Now get and objective point of view. A sampling of visitors, a full formal Human Factors test cycle preformed by a 3rd party, or just your friends and business associates, but no matter how you do it, get another opinion. The more objective and closer to your site's audience demographic the better. It is always useful to see how others interpret your site's content and it is rare that it happens how you think it will. 
10. Reevaluate and Repeat:
    And you thought you were almost done... Sorry, but this is an evolutionary process and it never ends as long as your web site exists. You should always be reevaluating your customer needs, their questions and watching how people actually use your site through any type of Traffic Analysis available to you. The first pass is generally guess work, but over time you can refine your initial impressions and make changes to your site to better help you reach your goal.

Just a little common sense.

So, ready to Get Started?

Note: the basic method expressed here is loosely
based on methods taught by Information Mapping (IMI)