How to Plan Your Website

Do you know why you want a website and what that website is going to do for you/your business?

The first stage in building your site is deciding What do you want the Website to Do?

This may seem a pretty obvious question but it is often a question that most website owners never seem to ask themselves.

 It is also probably the main reason why many website owners are unhappy with their website performance.

So before you begin make sure you ask yourself these questions.

• Why do I want a website?
• Will I need to update the site frequently?
• How many Pages will I need?
• Will I sell products from the website?
• Will I use the website to attract new customers?
• Will the website simply be a brochure for the company?
• What will my website visitors expect to see?
• Will I have private parts of the site?
• Will I publish a newsletter?
• How much am I prepared to pay?
• Will I be doing it myself?
• Will I be monetizing the site
• How will I get visitors to the site?
• Is my Target audience global, national, local?
• etc

Building it Yourself or Outsourcing

Once you have a general idea of what you want from your website you can then move on to the second stage of deciding who will be doing what.

As with any project you can either:

Do it Yourself or Have someone do it for you or a mixture of the two.

Generally speaking outsourcing will mainly be considered by business website owners but is an option regardless of website type- business or personal.

 Outsourcing doesn't necessary just mean getting someone to do some work for you. It can, and often does, mean buying a package/service that does the work.

This is very common and even very experienced webmasters do this.

As an example if you want a to establish a newsletter and your host doesn't provide one or the one it provides is inadequate you can either: write one your self or use an existing autoresponder service.

Your level of expertise and how much time you are willing to commit will determine to a great extent how much you will outsource.

Generally the more technically capable you are and the more time you can devote, then the more you can do yourself.

Listing Your Site Requirement

It is a good idea to state the overall requirements and make a preliminary list of the site requirements and who will be doing the tasks e.g.

Take for example a fictitious graphics design company.

Requirements overview

The Site will be used to attract new customers and to showcase the company expertise. All work is digital and so the audience will be global. Orders will be accepted initially via telephone and email, and payments by paypal and cheque.

Website outline

As a result of further research other requirements may arise like:

• Set up of email database and autoresponder for contacting existing customers with offers etc
• Using PPC (pay per click) while waiting for site to rank in search engines.
• Adding Google analytics to monitor site visitors.

It should be clear from the above that building a website is in fact an ongoing task and that you don't have to do everything at once.

Related Articles and Resources

• Keywords and Keyword Research
• Autoresponders and email marketing