subject: Planning Your Way To The Cyber World [print this page] Regardless whether its a personal page or a business web site, proper planning is needed when creating a website. By carefully planning how your site should appear and how it should react to visitors, you can assure a steady stream of traffic to your site.
Before starting with anything, you have to figure out first what you need the site for. Oftentimes, people think that creating a web site involves the same steps and principles regardless of what the site would be for. In reality, sites that focus on giving information are design in a different way than a site that is focused on ecommerce. Knowing also what your site is for would give you an idea on what pages as well as modules to include.
Determine what organizational structure of your site would be and create an outline of what you want each page to have as well as where each page goes. This would be helpful later on when determining how you would structure your navigation button. Once you have done the outline, you can start working on the visual design of your site.
Another important step in website planning is designing your navigation system. Keep in mind that your visitors should get the information they need with as few clicks as possible. Using your outline, you can determine which items should appear on the main navigation bar and which ones are much better off at the local navigation bars. Make sure also that you include a search box to enable your visitors to just type in the information that they need.
In planning a website, it is a good idea to test first how your site would look using your own computer. Do not put it on the hosting server first as people who would see your site might get confused. Keep in mind that, most often than not, any information you put in the internet, stays there almost forever. This is aside from the fact that it would also be hard for you to edit your site once it is on the server.
Lastly, when planning a website, make sure that your site would be able to look the same and behave in the same way regardless of the browser being used by the visitor.
