Planning A Website

The single most important step in designing and building any website is planning. Without a good plan, you cannot hope to design a good look-and-feel, you cannot hope to present useful and informative content to your users where they can easily find the information they want or need and you cannot hope to achieve a successful website on your first try. Without careful planning, you'll have to re-build your site many times to achieve your goals.

The problem with planning is that it is something that is rarely taught. Web design courses will teach you how to build HTML pages, with all the extras like CSS etc, but most will have nothing on how to plan a website. Many professional web designers have no idea how to plan a website, and there are no books called, "Planning Websites for Dummys" or "Planning Websites in 21 days". You could try taking a professional (and expensive) project management course, and then ignore two thirds of what you learn. After all, many of the skills they'll teach you in planning an oil refinery, or the software to run it, will be unnecessary for a small project like a website. The basic one third, however, will stand you in good stead. The other way is to use logic, basic common sense, trial-and-error and experience.

You could also try hiring a professional web designer to do your site for you, but in my experience, most designers expect you to provide the plan. They simply take what you've given them, and turn it into a website. The better the plan you supply them, the better the website they produce, so this brings you back to creating a plan yourself. Remember that no web designer knows your business as well as you do, so they are going to require a lot of input from you to create the site, no matter how good they are. The basic steps to planning a website are as follows:

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