How to Create a Website Plan

Website planning wireframes
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Because of free and simple online website design software and online content management platforms, such as WordPress, it is easier than ever to create a new website. Within five minutes and a couple of clicks, you can have a home business website. However, if your goal is to have a website that brings in clients and customers, you can't simply slap together a website and expect success. Planning a website is just as important as creating one.

To help ensure you don’t miss any crucial steps in building your website, follow the simple P.L.A.N. acronym to create a web presence that will help you reach your home business goals.

What P.L.A.N.​ Stands For

To help you understand what your website will need, use the P.L.A.N. acronym:

Prepare – Identify your target audience, appropriate website tone, and goals.

Landscape – Think through how you would like your website to be able to function. More specifically, what features need to be on your site?

Aesthetics – The way your website looks and feels is just as important as what it can do. Think about what colors and images you want on your site and how your site compares to your competitors.

Navigation – It is important to plan how you want your audience directed through your website. By thinking through what pages you need and how they should be laid out, you will help ensure, early on, the good visitor experience.

How To P.L.A.N. a Website

PREPARE: Before you jump online to buy your domain name and web hosting to build your site, you need a plan. Pull out your business plan to help you with these steps:

  1. Determine who is your target market. Think about who are the most likely buyers of what you're selling, and what is the best way to speak to them.
  2. Settle on the goal for your website. Your goal includes what do you want the website to do for you and if you want to generate leads, sell products, or perhaps operate as an online brochure. 
  3. Pull together the information you need on the site to achieve your goal. 
  4. Organize your information based on your target market, and how you think is the best way to provide this information to your customers. In some cases, the tone will be formal or business-like, other presentions require a more casual—perhaps even whimsical—appearance.

LANDSCAPE: Figuring out the "lay of the land" for your website is essentially determining which website features are essential and desirable to meet the goals for your website. To do that, you need to refer back to the goals for your website in the previous step. For instance, if you want to sell products, you are going to need credit card processing and a shopping cart feature.

Features to consider include:

  • Lead magnet to build an email list
  • Ecommerce set up including shopping cart and payment processing
  • Photo or video gallery
  • Blog 
  • Map and directions if you see clients in your home office
  • Contact page or information including your hours of operation
  • Social media links and share buttons
  • Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
  • Portfolio
  • Testimonial page

Not only do you want to consider front-end features, but also, you'll want to consider back-end features such as: 

  • Integrated marketing systems such as search engine optimization (SEO) 
  • Security measures, such as an SSL certificate to help your visitors feel safe
  • Caching to help your web pages load faster

You don't necessarily need all of the features listed above. Again, you need to consider your market and your goals for the site in determining what is needed.

AESTHETICS: Design aesthetics, or the way your site looks, is a crucial piece of the website creation process. Thankfully, most web hosts offer templates and content management platforms have themes to make this part easy.

How to decide the look of your site:

  1. Go back to who you determined to be your market. Think about their demographics. You would approach business owners differently than you would parents or survivalists. It's important to match your site's tone to your market. For instance, don’t pick some crazy colored music industry template if you plan to do business in a conservative business-to-business (B2B) marketplace.
  2. Make your site easy to read. Generally, white font on a black background is harder to read than black on white. Also, consider the font style. Stick with basic fonts that all browsers will be able to deliver to the reader. 
  3. Use images, because as the old adage goes, a picture says a thousand words. Research indicates that readers are attracted to visual content. But you need to choose quality graphics that enhance your content and message and not go overboard with too many images. You can take your own photos or there are​ free and low-cost stock photo options available on the Internet. If you don't have fancy photo editing software, you can use one of the free and low-cost online graphic editing options, such as Canva.
  4. Just like with a print newspaper, what's above the fold is the top content. You want your best information, the information your visitors have come to your site to find, front and center on the screen. There are too many other websites your visitors can visit if they can't find what they want on your website. You'll want to keep this in mind for each of your website's pages. Avoid making your visitors have to scroll down to get the information they want.
  5. Employ a responsive design. Responsive design allows web pages to be translated into a format that is viewable on mobile devices such as connected smartphones and pads.

If you're stuck on how to visually create the tone of your website, visit your competitors’ websites to see how they do it. You'll get ideas on what to do, as well as what you can do better.

Important

You don't want to copy or plagiarize. You simply want to get a sense of the colors, fonts, and themes that are used to create an atmosphere for visitors.

NAVIGATION: Website navigation is the way the website pages and links are organized. Deciding your navigation structure before you build is crucial to designing a site that is easy for your visitors to use and to find what they want. To determine your site's navigation:

  1. Use a piece of paper to map out your site. At the top, you'll have your homepage or top page of your site. This is the page that your domain URL (www.yourbusiness.com) will direct to.
  2. List pages you know you need such as "About" and "Contact" just below your Homepage. If you will have a checkout or shopping cart that feature will also go on this level.
  3. List main categories of your site, just below your Home Page—on the same level as "About" and "Contact." For example, if you have a cooking store, your main categories might be, "Utensils," "Pots & Pans," "Kitchen Tools," and "Recipes."
  4. Under your main categories, list subcategories. Using the cooking store example again, under "Utensils" you might have "Knives," "Serving Utensils," or other items in that category. Under "Kitchen Tools" you might have equipment like "Crockpots," "Spiralizers," and "Mixers." 

Once you know all the pages you'll need, decide how you'll make these pages easy to find. Most sites have a top and/or a side menu that appears on every page. Top menus tend to have more limited space than side menus, so usually, you want only your main pages (Home, About, Contact) and possibly your top category page links at the top. But again, you want to make it easy for people to find what they're looking for.

One option is to have a drop-down list from the top menu. Returning to the Cooking Store example, when a person hovers over the main category of "Utensils" on the top menu, a drop-down list of the sub-categories, "Knives" and "Serving Utensils" appears. You can achieve this through side menus using a nesting effect, in which clicking on the main category then opens the sub-category list below it. 

Include a search box on your website for the impatient person who doesn't want to poke around to find what they want, or for the visitor who's having trouble finding what they want. 

Putting It All Together

Once you've completed your P.L.A.N., you're ready to move on to the building phase. That starts with buying a domain name and web hosting, and then choose the theme that will fit your tone, and provide all the features you want to include.

Once you've built your site, be sure to check that all pages and graphics load correctly. Test your forms to ensure they're working. Consider previewing and using your site on different browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari), as well as on mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) to make sure all elements appear and work.

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