More than 20 years after businesses began getting online, content remains a black box to most organizations—and often to many digital marketing and design professionals as well.

Even now, we see websites that fall short of the targeted, strategic content you need to get results in today’s crowded information economy.

When it comes to content, good enough isn’t really good enough. Faced with low traffic, poor conversion rates, and boring copy, you might be tempted to fling up your hands and accept that great website content just isn’t your thing.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Client responsibilities in a website project extend beyond vendor selection and paying invoices. To make sure your project stays on time and on budget, it’s critical that you name a project owner.

Every website project team needs a designated point person with decision-making authority. Before your project kicks off, determine who will represent your organization in this crucial function.

Website functionality is essentially what your website can do and how it works. It encompasses everything from the actions a user can perform to dynamic content and interactivity.

Providing the right functionality is crucial to the success of a website, and it should be an essential part of the planning phase. Before your website is ever written, designed, or coded, you should have a clear scope of the features it will offer. Getting halfway through a website build just to realize that you are missing some essential functionality can quickly derail a project!

So where do you begin narrowing down the requirements for your website? Use this article to guide you through the process of defining your website’s functionality needs.