Planning Your Website

Before you proceed with your web building project, you must at least know what your site is going to be about and what you’re trying to achieve with it. Just like you can’t build a house without a blueprint, you CANNOT build a web site without a plan. Trust me, planning can save you from many unnecessary headaches in the future.

Your plan does not have to be complicated. Just a simple one . . . enough to keep you on the right track. If you've been on the net as long as I have, you'll know how hard it is to stay on track.

Just have a basic idea of the following:

• What's Your Objective?
• Who's Your Target Audience?
• What's Your Competition Doing?
• Create a Site Map
• List Material You Already Have
• Choose a type of web site

Now go grab a pen and paper and start writing down answers to the following questions.

What's your aim?

What's the aim of your web site? What are you trying to achieve? Your answer will affect your design and the tools you use.

• Are you trying to sell a single product? In which case, you may want to set up a simple direct response mini site that focus on one thing and one thing only - getting that sale.
• Or perhaps you want to build a mailing list? A name squeeze page would be the way to go here.
• Or maybe you want to impress others with your ever evolving expertise. A blog may be just the right tool to share your work and opinion on a regular basis.
• It could even be just to build relationships and trust. How about a community site with discussion forums and an article repository.
• Or maybe you just want to create a web site for your family members to visit. In which case, you can skip the rest of this lesson because your family's gonna visit your web site anyway, even if it takes forever to load. This doesn't mean they'll come back for a second visit though.

Who's your target audience?

You need to figure out who you’re trying to reach. What is your chosen niche? Your niche can be anything your heart desires but for your site to be successful from the start, you have to choose a niche that others are interested in.

If you choose an area that no one else is interested in, you’ll find it hard to attract visitors to your site. Ideally, your target market should be passionate about their niche.

The magic word here is FOCUS. It's much easier to build a site for a specific target audience. The more focused the better.

Knowing your target market makes it easier to choose the appropriate images, color, bait and more importantly .. words.

You should also do a bit of research on what technology your audience use. Are they just the normal everyday people surfing the net on a 28.8k dial up connection with no more than just the normal computer? Or are they the computer freaks with high speed broadband connection and state of the art computers with multimedia capabilities?

If you're only just beginning and you're not sure, it's better to assume that your audience are 'normal'. You can always upgrade your site later when you get to know your audience a bit better.

What's your competition doing?

Go to Google.com and do a quick search on what type of sites are already available in your niche. You may even find a site that's already doing what you want to do.

See what they have on their web sites. Ideas are bound to pop up in your head. Have a basic idea of what type of web sites others, in your niche, have. But stay away from copying straight out of other people’s web sites. You could get into unnecessary trouble. Make notes of possible features that you may want to have on your site.

Creating a sitemap

If you are planning on creating a two page website, your map will be a very simple one. You could probably even get away without a site map.

But it would be handy to know, what sort of information you're planning to include. Whether or not they will be on separate web pages. If so, how many web pages would be on your web site? And what these pages are. And how they link to each other. And whether or not you’ll be grouping them into categories.

A site map is a visual representation of your web site. When you have your web pages in the form of a map, it becomes easier to see the 'whole' picture.

Having a picture of your whole web site will also make it easier to create a navigation system that is useful to your visitors.

Here are some common pages on a site:

• About Us
• Features
• Benefits
• Testimonials
• Products and services
• Order
• Ezine
• Affiliates
• Links
• FAQ
• Sitemap
• Individual articles
• Privacy policy
• Forum
• Terms of use
• Shopping cart
• Contact Us

You don't have to include all of these pages. Just pick those that suit you most.

Listing material you already have

Before you go around collecting and creating material for your web site, make a note of what you already have. If you already have most of your material, you can save a lot of time.

Using existing material can also increase your business' brand awareness. Your offline customers will quickly adapt to your web site. It is important that you keep the look and feel of your business consistent, not just throughout your web site but also between your offline and online presence.

Your existing material could be anything:

• your business logo.
• a color scheme.
• web images.
• images of your products.
• brochures and flyers
• articles.

Anything at all.

Choosing your web site type

Once you've figured out what you're trying to achieve with your web site, it is time to choose a suitable type of web site to build.

Different web site types are used for different purposes.

Here are the different types of web site you can build:

• A micro site: This type of site usually consist of one or two web pages. It is used to create landing pages, opt in pages and sales letter type pages.
• A mini site: A mini site has slightly more pages, usually about 5. This type of site is commonly used by small businesses to build an online presence. The site normally includes a homepage, a page about their services and products, a contact page, and maybe a pricing or rates page.
• A blog site: This is a of content site. The distiguishing feature of blog site is the way content is added chronologically.
• A content site: A content site is just what the name implies. Its main purpose is to provide content. Unlike blogs, its content can be ordered in anyway. The site could be made up of news clips, articles and blog posts.
• A forum site: I think this one needs no explanation.
• An ecommerce site: This site consist mainly of a shopping cart that showcases products.