The Planning Process

How to Plan Your Website

The most important part of a website is to have good content. This gives people a reason to visit a site. Using relevant, descriptive text on your website is important not only to your visitors, but also for search engines, which digest the text to determine what keywords are relevant to your site.

Decide what you want on your homepage. What do you want to say to introduce your site and welcome your visitors? Figure out who will be using this site and what you want on it. Good content will bring visitors to your site. This will include text, images, and a color scheme. Links to other sites (external links) and links to other pages on your own site (internal links) should be included on the homepage. How many linking pages will you need? What topics do you want to cover on each of theses other pages?

Here are the 5 important things people expect to see on a website:

1. How your business is unique.
2. A clear sense of what your site offers.
3. Contact information, including a phone number and physical location.
4. Third-party validation such as customer testimonials, client lists, and awards received.
5. Ease of use and navigation.

When first planning what is needed, think of your website as an outline such as seen on the left or as a chart as shown on the right. Of course this will change depending on the number of pages needed.

After viewing the two examples, you may see that the two demonstrate the same layout. Most websites may not start this complicated. They may initially start with just 1-3 pages.

We also offer a simple website as an easy starter.