Sustainable brand go hand in hand with a sustainable web presence. How to build a sustainable website ?

Yes, very true - your brand, your identity are well connected with your sustainable website/ web presence!

Lets see the key points involved in planning, creating and launching a sustainable website :

For eg: if you re introducing a new product or going after a new market, a separate website (or separate section on your main website) might make the most sense. However, if you ve always had a focus on sustainable practices and are trying to align that with the growing interest in the general marketplace, creating a separate sustainability site might not be the right answer. Augmenting your core web presence might be a better solution.

• Audience: Who are you writing for and what do they care about? who is your audience consumer or business users? If it s business, think carefully about the audience level. The way you write, and the information you present, will be very different for manager and line-level employees than if you re targeting C-level executives. The benefits you emphasize, the pain points you address, and the solutions you offer up may vary depending on subtle differences in who you re addressing externally.

• Aim: This is extremely important. The question is simple: What does outcome look like? Are you interested in traffic? Sales? Awareness? PR? Thought leadership?

Once you have answers to these questions, define a measurable objective to determine whether or not you ve been successful. It could be a specific traffic or web hit figure. It could be a volume of sales leads generated from the site. It could be an uptick in press pick-ups from content posted on the site.

• Content: Your pre-work around objectives and audience should give you a clear game plan for content as well not just what type of content, but also format and frequency.

Think well in advance about the type of content you need for your target audience. Having enough content in the bank when your site launches not only gives you diversity and comprehensiveness up front, but also gives you plenty of additional content to rotate in on a regular basis, keeping the site fresh, engaging and relevant.

• Updating/ maintaining your website: You may not update the site s content every day, or every week. But launching a site and letting it sit stale is equally a bad idea. Ensure that you re updating content at least a couple times each month. Depending on how you ve defined your audience and site objectives will dictate what this means in terms of specific content articles, blog posts, industry statistics, etc.

• Dedicate a web owner: Many web projects are doomed from the start. Why? Someone on the marketing team takes on creation of the website as a side project, gets it built and launched, then goes back to what they typically do every day. The site s up and built, so job done. Right? Wrong.

  If you re going to launch a sustainability web presence for your brand, ensure that the right amount of resources are dedicated to its upkeep well after launch. If you don t have these resources available, think very hard about whether you re ready and/or committed to having that sustainability web presence in the first place. Your company may consider such web content vitally important, but launching the site only to let it immediately get stale and irrelevant should equally be considered a deal-breaker.