Website Planning Guide

Let's get started planning your site! Spending the time to plan your website will save you time and money.

Goals

What do you want to achieve by your presence on the web? What do you want your site to provide?

• specialized information?
• product or services information?
• company information?
• customer support?
• newsletter?
• online shopping?
• special sales promotion?

Audience

Who will be visiting your site? What age group? Will the visitor most likely be from a certain job type? Will they be technically challenged or more likely to accept new technology? Where will they access your site from (home, school, work, public library)?

The answers to these questions will help determine a great deal about how your website should be presented and designed. For example, if your typical visitor is apt to be accessing your site primarily from a public school or library, then there's a good chance their browser could be out of date. The way your site looks and acts is directly related to the visitor's browser and its version.

Content Selection

What do you want your visitors to know about you, your company or products through your website?

• Contact Information - name, address, phone, fax, email, business hours
• Photos and/or graphics
• Summary of your products or services
• Product catalog
• Product manuals / guides
• Product sales information
• Product specifications
• Service manuals / guides
• FAQ's about your products and services
• Company brochure
• Presentations
• Company policy statement
• Mission statement
• Customer testimonials
• Portfolio
• Visitor interactive forms
• Search feature or database access to product specs
• Online purchase of products and services
• Feedback form
• Guestbook
• Discussion (or "chat") forum
• Online newsletter, or newsletter sign-up
• Content to download

You're doing fine - your plan is starting to come together. Now let's look at how to get your content ready for your website.

Content for the Web

At this point your designer should be able to give you an idea of how many pages will be necessary and what information will be contained on each.

Now that you have a good idea of what you want on your website you'll need to provide this information to your web designer, page by page.

All text for your site should be provided in a computer ready format - either as a Microsoft Word document, *.doc, or text document, *.txt. If your designer has to type all the text onto the pages of your site the cost of your site will likely increase considerably - you'd probably have to pay by the hour for this service.

Graphics for your site should be in digital format. The most common are JPEG, GIF, or BMP. Designers have their own preference in graphics software and can tell if there are other formats they can accept and work with.

Photos in digital format are the best. However, scanning the photos is normally available from your designer. Illustrations or drawings can be scanned also.

That's about it! You're ready and so is your designer (who, by the way, has not been sitting idly by - we've been working with you during this process and also on your design layout, navigation, and all the other things we do in the background to provide you with an effective website)!

Domain Name

A domain name is a unique alpha-numeric name used to identify a particular computer (i.e. Web server or mail server) on the Internet.

Domain names allow Internet users to type in a name, such as mybrand.com, to identify a numeric address such as 209.67.50.203. The purpose of domain names is to allow ordinary users connected to the Internet to find Web sites and send email to addresses with familiar names such as "mybrand.com" without having to memorize the numerical addresses that actually locate the computers or servers on the Internet.

These guidelines may help you in selecting your domain name:

• .COM - to be used for commercial and personal sites
• .NET - recommended for companies involved in Internet infrastructure
• .ORG - recommended for not-for-profit organizations
• Use only letters, numbers, or hyphen ("-")
• Cannot begin or end with a hyphen
• Must have less than 63* characters, not including .COM, .NET and .ORG
• .com, .net and .org domain names exceeding a total of 26 characters are supported by most web browsers. However, certain web browsers, email programs and other Internet related applications may not support domain names over 26 characters.

Final Thoughts

It's a good idea to use any guidelines you already have in place to establish your identity company colors, logo, slogan? What do you first want visitors to see when they arrive at your site?

Preferences

Surf the Web! Look at a variety of websites. Make notes on what you like or dislike and why. Write down the URL or address of the sites also.

Give some thought to the maintenance of your website. Who will update the content or make the changes necessary? Do you have the knowledge, equipment and tools, and, most importantly, the time to do this? Do you need to consider a maintenance contract with your designer?

Promotion of your website is important. You need to have visitors and customers. How are they going to get to your site? Most designers provide in their quote the placement of keywords and meta tags along with search engine registration.

Remember, not everyone has fast and powerful computers. There are still many users with older systems which use older versions of operating systems and browsers. The older systems and browsers are often limited in what they can access on a site or how they can view a site.

Also, there are many different browsers and each browser reads page code differently. Don't limit yourself by assuming everyone is using one or the other of the major browsers. Don't expect a user to update or change browsers to view your site. It's easier for them to just not view your site. I test each site I develop to insure compatibility with older systems. It is possible to use the newest techniques on your site and still provide access for older systems by providing alternate pages. However, this can be quite costly on a large site.

Check out your competition! What are they doing on their website? What you can do to make your site standout from the competition.

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