Planning your web site is the most important step. Good planning saves time and money, and bad planning send the designer and developer into a line of endless revisions, trying to guess what you have not articulated clear enough. But what if you yourself don't know clearly what you need? There are 10 easy things to do when planning for it.
Remember, that Striderlance can help you formulate your ideas and interact with you on any stage of your project development, including planning and organizing.
- Set goals
- Understand the audience
- Envision functionality
- Determine the landing points
- Define structure
- Review the perspective
- Interact with Striderlance
- Brush up the plan to remove unnecessary stuff
- Discuss milestones, deadlines, and payments
- Write it all down and send it to Striderlance
1. Set Goals
What do you want to acheive with your web site? Some business people think of a website as a "business card", simply a means of telling their customers, that "they are there". In reality, your web site can do much more than that! It can and it should bring you profit, directly or indirectly. Here are few examples of usual web site types and the goals behind them.
- Commerce websites are also known as "online shops". Their goal is to sell online.
- Promo websites advertise and promote products and services.
- Blogs are web sites that reflect the flow of either personal of corporate messages. A good personal way to keep your clients informed.
- Commerce websites are also known as "online shops". Their goal is to sell online.
- Info and Support websites provide information for their customers, and usually have a support forum or tickets system to answer questions and support requests.
2. Understand the audience
Whom is your website for? Some do websites as if it were for themselves, and thus make the biggest mistake one can make in making a web site. You make your web site for a client, not for yourself. And you will have to give him or her what they want, or you may as well not do your web site at all.
So, who your client is? Corporate user or end user? If later, then of what average age? Sometimes, for some of the products, such details as sex, age, education, nationality may have their role. These details will influence web site design and organization.
3. Envision functionality
Once you have a clear picture of your goals for the web site and it's future audience, the time comes to ask yourself this question: What does my site need to do to reach my goals for it? Does it need to be able to sell stuff online? Does it need to be able to allow people create content or comment on content? What kind of feedback does it need to have?
4. Determine the landing points
Landing Points are pages, where the goal of the web site is reached. These are usually pages where clients either purchase, subscribe, vote, or do any other action that serves the goal of your web site.
There are usually only few landing points on you web site, so that both you and your client know, that this is the web site's goal. When you go to a lawyer's web site, and see the "Contact Us" link, you see on of the landing points.
5. Define structure
Which sections will I have? How will they be related? At this point, we will help you identify most important sections that will appear in the site-wide navigation menu. Key elements, important for reaching the set goals, the landing points, are structured for the future web site for maximum effectiveness.
6. Review the perspective
What is the web site's intended life span? Web sites can't satisfy the demands for ever. As the time flows, the market nomenclature changes, technology develops, design evolves. It usually takes 3 to 5 years for a web site to become obsolete and reach the point where customers will feel it is outdated.
What maintenance work will be required for this web site and how regularly? Adding and removing contents. Security updates (for a dynamic web site). Forum or comments moderation for a social network? Any other changes that may be necessary. Striderlance provides all kinds of maintenance support for plain HTML, Drupal and Sitehound based web sites, and for Joomla and WordPress web sites as far as their core functionality allows.
7. Interact with Striderlance
Coordinate your plan with Striderlance. You don't need to have professional knowledge of web design, usability, web platforms scalability and SEO to formulate your goals. Coordinate your plans and thoughts with Striderlance, and we will help you refine and formulate your web design plans into a good and clear web design plan.
8. Brush up the plan to remove unnecessary stuff
Clear your plan off all unnecessary stuff. It's a so-called Occam's razor principle, whereby we should not bring in anything that is not really needed. If something in the plan does not serve the web site's goal, it has to go. That will save time and money to build the web site, and provide a clean and logical environment for the clients.
9. Discuss milestones, deadlines, and payments
Now, when the plan is almost ready, the last thing to do is to determine what will be needed to build the website. This includes:
The milestones are intermediary tasks that need to be completed for the web site to be built. Striderlance proposes four easy milestones: Creating of a Plan, Web Design, Coding, Adding Contents. Milestones are objective points where you can evaluate and approve our work. Striderlance will ask you review and approve each milestone before advancing to the next stage.
The deadlines are time tags attached to the milestones. Deadlines allow keeping track of time, synchronizing web site creation with outher events, like actions, ads, etc., as well as it is an excellent accountability tool.
The deadlines are time tags attached to the milestones. Deadlines allow keeping track of time, synchronizing web site creation with outher events, like actions, ads, etc., as well as it is an excellent accountability tool.
10. Write it all down and send it to Striderlance
Once the web design plan is completed, send it to us, and we are ready to proceed to the stage 2 - Web Design.
