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Here are a few steps to help you out with your website planning.
Website Purpose
As mentioned above, you have to understand why you’re creating the site. Take the time to
reduce what you want from the website to writing. Brainstorm with your partners or friends, or even better, with your customers and find out what they would like to see. If you do a good job with this task you’ll end up with an
impossibly long list of objectives ranging from lead generation to providing online customer
service.
Take that list and prioritize it by importance. Once you’ve done that, look at the top
three or four objectives. These will be your primary goals. You’re new at this; don’t try
to create the perfect website on your first time out. As you gain experience the website
will evolve and at some point you will have covered every item on your prioritized list.
The important thing is to get started and if you wait until you have what you think is the
perfect design you will have missed out on significant opportunities.
Website Appearance
There is an incredible number of design options that are limited only by your imagination
and budget. One way to make choosing a design plan a bit easier is by doing a little
comparison shopping. Visit your competitors’ sites and write down what you like and what
you don’t. Go through the same exercise with sites that come up on the first page of
a search engine after you enter a query that’s relevant to your business. Pay particular
attention to the ease of navigation, number of panels in the layout, color schemes used
and the type and placement of graphics, videos and photographs.
Review your list and then sketch out what you would like your home page to look like. Once
you’re satisfied with the rough design it’s time to think about building.
Website Platform
A platform is the software that the website resides on. The free platform WordPress has
become extremely popular with small businesses because of its built in features that
eliminate much of the technical design and development skills required. Of course there
are other options as well, some free and some that cost.
Before you make a decision on which platform you’re going to use, do some research and get
a feel what other webmasters think of the product. Remember, your site is not going to be
a static sales brochure. You’ll be making updates on a regular basis and you want
a platform that is not only easy to use but that doesn’t take all day to modify.
If you follow these three steps you should be in a pretty good position to go forward with
an actual website design and launch. Remember, these sites are not carved out of granite.
As you get experience with traffic you can modify and optimize your design to better
achieve your objectives.
Website Purpose
As mentioned above, you have to understand why you’re creating the site. Take the time to
reduce what you want from the website to writing. Brainstorm with your partners or friends, or even better, with your customers and find out what they would like to see. If you do a good job with this task you’ll end up with an
impossibly long list of objectives ranging from lead generation to providing online customer
service.
Take that list and prioritize it by importance. Once you’ve done that, look at the top
three or four objectives. These will be your primary goals. You’re new at this; don’t try
to create the perfect website on your first time out. As you gain experience the website
will evolve and at some point you will have covered every item on your prioritized list.
The important thing is to get started and if you wait until you have what you think is the
perfect design you will have missed out on significant opportunities.
Website Appearance
There is an incredible number of design options that are limited only by your imagination
and budget. One way to make choosing a design plan a bit easier is by doing a little
comparison shopping. Visit your competitors’ sites and write down what you like and what
you don’t. Go through the same exercise with sites that come up on the first page of
a search engine after you enter a query that’s relevant to your business. Pay particular
attention to the ease of navigation, number of panels in the layout, color schemes used
and the type and placement of graphics, videos and photographs.
Review your list and then sketch out what you would like your home page to look like. Once
you’re satisfied with the rough design it’s time to think about building.
Website Platform
A platform is the software that the website resides on. The free platform WordPress has
become extremely popular with small businesses because of its built in features that
eliminate much of the technical design and development skills required. Of course there
are other options as well, some free and some that cost.
Before you make a decision on which platform you’re going to use, do some research and get
a feel what other webmasters think of the product. Remember, your site is not going to be
a static sales brochure. You’ll be making updates on a regular basis and you want
a platform that is not only easy to use but that doesn’t take all day to modify.
If you follow these three steps you should be in a pretty good position to go forward with
an actual website design and launch. Remember, these sites are not carved out of granite.
As you get experience with traffic you can modify and optimize your design to better
achieve your objectives.
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