Website planning | Web Design Articles

When you begin thinking about creating a Web site, you should follow a series of planning steps to make sure your site is successful.

What do you want your website to achieve?

Do you need a website and if so why? Deciding what goals you want your website to achieve is the first step in planning your website. What do you hope to accomplish by having a website? Write down what you want to achieve with your website and refer to it when you go through your planning stages. Your goals will help you focus your website to solve your particular needs. Without a defined vision at the outset your final site is likely to provide little benefit to your business.
A web site that is primarily about promoting yourself or promoting your company will, look and feel a lot different to a web site that sells products.

Set specific success criteria

It may be useful to set out success criteria. Are there any specific targets you can set out to determine the level of success? Would the target be achieving a certain sales target, acquiring a set number of registered users, a set number of visitors a month?

Who is your target audience?

It is important to know who your target audience is before you start to build your site. The site design and content should be created with this audience in mind.

Often a website has a number of potential audience groups; most sites have at least 15 to 20. For each potential user group, ask yourself how important each group is to your business on a scale of 1 to 10.

If you have too many groups there is a danger is that your website will not appeal to everyone or worse still will appeal to none. The best idea is to shorten the list, failing that you could think about setting up micro sites or sections of the site that will be designed to appeal to a subset of users.

Once you have established your target audience then you will be able to answer questions like whether your site will be multi-lingual, will it need to display on PDA’s etc.

How is your target audience going to find you?

Search engines like lots of text and sites that other people link to. If you are going to get most of your leads from search engines, you will need to identify which search keywords you wish to target, as well as develop content and consider a reciprocal linking campaign (exchanging links with similar sites). The time and effort you’ll need to spend on your search engine placement also depends heavily on the competitiveness of your keywords. For instance, if you are only marketing locally and your search terms look like “South Wales Bargain Cars”, it is a much smaller market and it will be much easier to get high rankings than if your keywords were just “Bargain Cars”.

What content and features will the site have?

Gather together all the content and features that you want on your site. Have you got relevant content for each of your target audience groups? Does your content help with your objectives? Do you need to write any new content? Is your content relevant to the web medium? People don’t read online, they scan. Therefore, content has to be much shorter and more direct. Does your content assist your search engine strategy?

Try and plan exactly what features or functional elements your site will contain. Features include things like newsletter signup, message boards or forums.

Make sure you know what content you have for your site before moving on to the next step which is organizing your content.
How should your content be structured?

Map out how your site is to be organised. Be careful not to organise the site based on your company’s organisation. It is important to remember that your users don’t think about the structure of your company, they think about their needs and what they are trying to achieve.

You should try to have no more than seven items in any level of your hierarchy. Too many and people find it hard to scan, too few and they need to click on too many menus to get to their content.

Sites tend to have a couple of standard sections, such as About Us and Contact Us pages. It is easier for the user if you keep these in your structure.
 
Once the standard content list is done, look at the rest of your content and start to divide it into very general groups, these might include product listings, product information, company information, etc. Look at each content area and consider ways of further subdividing it.

Place content higher up in the content hierarchy if it is of potential interest to several different user groups. If it is of interest to only a small number of users, then it is probably more appropriate to place it in a subfolder at a lower level.

Plan the navigation structure

The aim of structuring your website is to be able to place content and functionality into your website navigation bar.
Your main navigation bar appears on all pages in the same place. In addition to standard items like links to the home page and contact information, the main navigation bar should include links to the top-level groups of content.
Subsidiary navigation is specific to a section of the site and links to content within a single top-level group. In sites where the information extends to several levels of subdivision, creating coherent subsidiary navigation can be a challenge. The most important principle to bear in mind is that, as users go down to the next subdivision, content above that level should remain easily accessible to them.

You can include subsidiary navigation that links to pages such as your privacy policy, copyright information, guarantees, and other information that is less easily categorized. These links are commonly included in small navigation bars at the bottom of each page.

Secondary navigation can be used to provide users with alternative ways of navigating. For example, users who know what they want to do might appreciate a drop-down list box containing links to the main content groups in an online store. That way, they can go directly to where they want to be. Other forms of secondary navigation include search functions and site maps which are important methods of helping users to quickly locate specific information.

The next step

The next step is to choose the right developer who can design, build and host your website.

Search Search | Explore Creo

More | Additional pages

UKWDA Text size: 1|2|3