subject: Website Planning for Beginners [print this page] Website Planning for Beginners Website Planning for Beginners
This is a very simple and easy to understand user guide for people who have absolutely no experience in website planning. It intends to answer some of the main questions that you may have and will hopefully prepare you for that first meeting with your web designer.
Selection and maintenance of the aim is the underlying, fundamental principle. As you go through the planning stages, keep referring back to your mission statement otherwise you will experience what we call 'Scope Creep'. This will undoubtedly lead to not just confusion but a higher design bill.
What is Your Website About?
A nice simple question but one that will impact upon everything else you do. Even the biggest of sites can be summarised easily and ideally you can describe what your site is about in one simple sentence. As you build your site you will be tempted by shiny new widgets or flashy graphics you stumble across which can easily lead to you going off topic or creating a confused site.
Segment, Target and Position
Every market, no matter how small, has multiple segments with one or more unifying characteristics. The art is to identify those you want to target and then position your site in such a way that they respond to it positively.
It is likely you will do a lot of this unconsciously and you don't have to sit down and draw up a business plan General Motors would be proud of, but make sure you always keep your audience in the back of your mind whenever you make a decision.
Market Research
Unless you are first to market you will be competing with other websites for people's eyeballs and loyalty. To avoid reinventing the wheel take advantage of their hard work and have a look at what they have done and sign up to any newsletters / marketing emails they have.
It is also worth looking at their meta-description and meta-keywords. Although they no longer influence the large search engines some sites still add them. From this you can see which keywords they deem to be most important and then use that information on your own site.
Forums, Blogs and Niche Social Networks
Have a look around the social media sites that cater for your target audience and see what people are saying about their current providers, both positive and negative (e.g. "I wish they gave me xyz as well" or "Mine has been so quick in responding to me"). From this you can see where the gaps are and what people consider to be important.
Choosing a Domain and Hosting
You'll find a warehouse's worth of content online offering advice and guidance about choosing a domain name, but to be frank it's not that hard. The difficulty lies in finding one that is actually available!
You will find that a lot of descriptive domain names already have the.com taken and possibly the co.uk as well. An alternative to both options described above is to create a name that could not possibly have been taken and build your brand around that. Existing examples include Ning.com, Meebo.com & Flickr.com.
Structure and Content
One of the most frustrating experiences is to hand code your navigation's menu and copy that across the entire site only to find you need to add another page and link. After updating all the menu's you find yet another page is required and you have to go back through it all again (and again...).
A little bit of planning up front will become a major time save further down the line so before you dive in to coding your site sit down with a pen and a paper and draw out how each page links to the others.
The author of this article works for Somerset Web Design company Blaze Concepts.
