Planning your website

Good Websites do not just happen. There is a lot of careful thinking and planning that makes a good website. The reason some people find it a big challenge to bring up a website or find it even more difficult to keep it up and running properly is that there is a lack of planning. Proper planning includes not just the first version but also about how to keep it up to date at all times.

Planning for a website has many aspects to it. There are some crucial decisions that you should take at the beginning to ensure that your website is successful. Here is a quick run down of some of these important ones.

Plan for your target audience

Although all websites use the basic building blocks, they are all different from a customer viewpoint. The first and foremost decision that you have to take during the planning stage is to decide about the target group. This is a business decision based on the service that you are planning to offer through the website or your product positioning.

Your entire design and usability decisions will be affected by this. For example, if your target audience belong to a certain geographic area where people speak a certain language, it is obvious that your website needs support for that local language.

Another example to illustrate this is to consider that your target audience is children. In this case your design and level of language need to be attuned to children such that they are keen and interested i visiting your website often.

Plan for usability

This is another important aspect that you have to consider that is missed out by many. Web Usability includes features to support ease of use by most of your target audience. Easy navigability, clear fonts, alternative access methods for visually challenged audience and other such aspects have to be considered.

There is no standard formula or strict guidelines for this but you should consider your target group carefully and ask yourselves if most of them will find your website easy to use or not. One of the must have features when you are considering usability features is to have a good search option. This is very useful especially when your website grows to a certain extent and has a good amount of content within it.

The other important aspect is to plan and test your website on the entire popular web browser. It should never happen that a feature of your website is not available to someone because your website does not appear properly in a certain browser. Telling a user that you should use only this browser to visit my website is like them “Come to my shop only if you are wearing green colour trousers!”

Content is the king

All said and done, there is no denying that even the best looking and most easy to use website will fail if there is no or little substance in your website. Content is indeed the king and you should keep this at the top of your mind at all times.

Refresh content on a regular basis. Most successful websites refresh the content almost every week if not earlier than that. The best way to do it is to gather content and keep a buffer so that you do not have to scramble every time a content refresh is due. It is needless to say that the quality of the content should also be good and useful for your target audience.

Plan for technology

Remember that technology is the vehicle and not the purpose of your website. The latest and most hyped technology need not necessarily be the right one for you.

Your planning should envisage about the source of the content, its review as well as publishing it on the web. Consider using a good CMS (Content Management System) to keep your recurring maintenance costs to a minimum. This will also keep you in good stead from various other aspects as well.