Planning Your Website
When you are new to website building, it may seem like too much work, or too intimidating. Building a website is not too difficult, and a little planning can save you time and frustration down the line. Ensuring that you take the time to plan your website is the best rule that all successful web designers follow, questions to answer and items to do.
What is the purpose of your website?
What content do you want to put on your website?
Outline your website on paper
Get your things together and build!
What is the purpose of your website?
A question you need to ask yourself is, what do you want your website to accomplish? Are you trying to organize your club? Do you want to expand your current business to have an online presence? Are you looking for a way to raise awareness about your non-profit? Whatever your reasons, you need to decide what your website will accomplish and who it is speaking to. For example, a club website that is meant for current members, and a club site advertising their accomplishments to the community would have very different content and tone. Deciding what your purpose will help tremendously when it comes to building.
What content do you want to put on your website?
You may want to put a lot of things on your website at first, so the best idea is to brainstorm and write down everything you want to include. Whether it's text, images, links, features, write it down. Now, organize your list of content into logical groups. For example, if you want to include your e-mail address and your postal address, you may want to group that together as part of a contact information section.
Outline your website on paper
Using the groups you have formed in the above step, start to outline your website. Once you have completed your outline, build a site map that will put your website into perspective, but also it will give you a good idea of how your site navigation will be. Start with your main categories and decide how you want these to connect to one another. Try and keep things simple! Limit your main categories to five or less. That is plenty to create a full-featured website
Get your things together and build!
Now that you have done a good amount of planning, it's time to get your content together and start building! Keep all your outlines and site maps with you when you start building and anything else you might need. If you are using your own photos, make sure you already have them scanned and saved to your computer so they are accessible to you and everything will come together.
Good luck! You are already half way there!
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