Educational Website Business Plan

The One Week At A Time website is the focus of our entire operation as it’s the only part of our company that interfaces with the customer.

The website will have a very simple design. The graphics will be minimal and we will keep unnecessary text out of the site as much as possible.

The website will simply explain a brief description and mission statement on the front page, have links to some environmental news, and then push the user towards doing one of the three following tasks:

1. Signing up for our weekly email tasks subscription.
2. Immediately going and browsing our weekly tips.
3. Reading our full mission statement to find out what the site is all about.

The back end of the website will be pretty simple as we’ll have a database storing the tips and subscriptions to the weekly tips newsletter. It will be a simple design to make it easy to maintain and to be fast and efficient so the majority of Mr. Williams time isn’t spent dealing with technical website issues.

6.1 Website Marketing Strategy

The One Week At A Time website has four basic website marketing strategies:

1. Search Engine Placement: The site copy is being initially written to contain keywords and phrases we know people are using in the search engines to find this type of content. Combined with good title tags and our simple design, we shouldn’t have a tough time getting decent placement for those search terms.
2. Link Building: In order to get more direct traffic, and to improve our search engine placement we intend on having a link building campaign to get links to our site from other environmental and educational websites. We will have a Resources section on our site that we’ll use to exchange links with other sites.
3. Pay-Per-Click: We will use Overture and Google Adwords to generate traffic via pay-per-click advertising. We’ll bid on keywords that relate to the products that we recommend on the site.
4. Word of Mouth: The content of our site should be compelling enough that people naturally want to pass on our weekly tips to friends, co-workers, family, classmates, etc. We’ll also have one weekly task which consists of telling others about our site, and have easy “send to a friend” options for our tips listed on our site.

6.2 Development Requirements

The development requirements for our website fall into three distinct phases:

1. Front End: The first step in our site development process is to develop the graphic look and layout for the site. We’ll develop one look and template we’ll use for all pages, so we estimate this will take about one week.
2. Back End: The second step is to code the part of our system that holds and distributes our content. We’ll create a database to store our weekly tips and information about those tips. We’ll also create a database to store the email address and other information about the people who’ve subscribed to our weekly tasks. Both these systems will interface with our front end since people will subscribe via the website, and we’ll use a Web form to write and edit our weekly tips in the database.
3. Tip Writing: After we have created the system, we’ll add content for the 52 weeks. We will write one tip at a time which will consist of a tip background and overview of the problem the tip helps to solve, the specific tip action, links to any products related to it, and links to other resources where people can learn more if they so choose.