Website Planning Guide

A helpful post over on Smashing Magazine about planning a web site. There are some good principles to think through, including:

• Needs & objectives assessment
• Alignment with marketing
• Roles & responsibilities
• Content
• Site design & structure
• CMS (Content Management Systems)
• Ongoing maintenance & updates

I’ve had people ask me “how much will it cost to build a web site?” That’s like asking a home builder “how much for a house?” — there are so many variables involved, and it all depends on what it is you want to accomplish with your site. It could be anything from a simple one page ‘brochure’ site to a complex database-driven e-commerce machine.

Some content options to think about when considering what your site might need:

• Articles
• Blog posts
• Advertising
• Discussion forum
• Images
• Documents (usually PDFs)
• Audio
• Video (embedded from YouTube or Vimeo, or self-hosted)
• Flash animation (I don’t recommend it)
• Content feeds/integrations from other sites
• Photo gallery
• Twitter stream
• Facebook ‘friends’ list
• RSS feeds
• E-commerce
• Forms for contact, quotes or something else
• Physical products (how many?)
• Digital content (what kind and how many?)
• Email newsletter
• Event calendar
• Event registration
• Search
• Social media sharing links (Twitter, Facebook, etc)
• Personnel directory

Planning and building a web site is much easier when you’re clear about what it is you want from the site.

Posted: June 9th, 2011
Filed under: Communication, Customers, Development, Marketing, Software, Web-based Tags: analysis, design | No Comments »

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