how to plan a website

How to Plan Your Website In this section of the tutorial we will look at the nuts and bolts of how to plan your website. The good news is that you will not need to invest a lot of time in planning your website. The time you do invest will be well worth the rewards.

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Here are the simple steps for planning your website:

• Identify the Goals of Your Website
• Identify Your Audience
• Create a List of Content That You Both Achieve Your Goals and Be of Interest to Your Audience.
• Divide This List into Pages
• Draw a Chart of Links Between Pages
• Create a Navigation Scheme that Links these Pages Together in a Simple Consistent Way.

Identifying the Goals of Your Website

Do the following exercise:

Right now, take a piece of page and write out a list of goals you want for your website. Next, take that list and combine it into one or two sentences.

Back to our previous example. Lets say you have an interest in nature photography. So you write down the following goals:

I want to meet other photographers.
I want to show others my work so they can critique it.
I want to teach others about my expertise in nature photography.
I want to create a forum for people to exchange their photos and experiences with others.

This can then be distilled down to:
I want to create a forum where I can exchange ideas with other photographers.

Identifying Your Audience

Next, you need to identify who is your audience. It may be family, friends, potential employers. In the example above, it would be nature photographers.

Create a List of Content

Do the following exercise:

Create a list of all of the content that you would like to include on your website that both achieves your goals and would be of interest to your audience. At this point, just write whatever comes to mind, do not try to organize it.

Divide the List Into Pages

Now that you have this list of content, organize it into pages. You can do this by organizing your ideas by topic and placing one major topic per page. Remember, unlike a paper document, a website is nonlinear. That means your audience doesn't read it from cover to cover, they will jump around from topic to topic in whatever manner suits them. This means that each page should stand on its own to some extent.

Draw a Chart of Links Between Pages

Now that you know what basic pages will make up your site do the following exercise:

Take a piece of paper and draw a box that represents each page of your website. Now draw lines between the boxes showing how you want the pages to connect to each other.

Look at the following illustration:



In this illustration of our imaginary photographer's site, you can see that all pages are linked to each other.

Create a Navigation Scheme

Once you have created a chart that shows how all of your pages are linked together, you can now create a navigation scheme that links these pages together in a simple consistent way. In the example above, all of the pages are linked to each other so in this case you might want create a set of links that is at the top or bottom of all of the pages.

Now that you have planned your site, you are now ready to get down and design it. The next section will show you how to make your site look good.