PREPARE
The most important thing you can do during the creation of your website is to prepare by thinking about your audience and your content message. Who are you trying to talk to? Then start thinking about what you want your website to do for your audience. Do you need a basic online marketing brochure/business card? What website content (written words) will you need? Will you write with a formal or causal tone? Your answers to all these questions will help establish your website personality and tone.
LANDSCAPE
Website Features
Figuring out the "lay of the land" for your website is essentially determining which website features are essential and desirable for your particular site. For instance, do you want to sell services or relay information? Do you want to have a gallery with photos or videos? How large will your file sizes be? For instance, will you have streaming video or music? All of this information is important to keep in mind so there aren't any surprises when it comes to your final website.
AESTHETICS
Good Looks.
Design aesthetics, or the way your site looks, is a crucial piece within the website creation process. When deciding on a design look and feel, make sure you take some time to research what some of your main competitors’ websites look like. This will provide you with context as you plan yours -- because ultimately, you want to create something that stands out in a good way. Images are crucial in building an environment where your website visitors will want to stay and click around your site. If you don’t have any of your own images to use, there are plenty of free or low cost stock photo options available on the Internet. If you are on a tight budget (and who isn’t these days?) be careful cutting corners on images. It may make sense to spend a little to get the image you want versus settling on an “ok” image which is free.
NAVIGATION
Visual Roadmap
Website navigation is the way the website pages and links are laid out. Do you want your menu up on the top or do you prefer to have your navigation along the left-hand side? Ease of navigation and easily identifiable links have been shown to influence website audience behavior. If your navigation is cluttered or not intuitive, your audience won’t stick around. Keep in mind that less content per page does better than pages with an abundance of written copy or images. A nice rule of thumb is to shy away from an amount of content that would require you to scroll down on the page to see it all.
SITE
Site Organization.
One of the best website planning tools is the creation of a rough site map (also referred to as wire frames). This doesn’t have to be complicated or fancy - a pen and paper, Excel spreadsheet or even an org chart software will do the trick. Start by listing out those website pages you already know you want to have, like: About Us, Service, Contact Us...etc. Then begin to organize those pages into main categories, sub-categories and any special features or images you hope to have on that page. This visual map will help identify any holes in your site’s content and ultimately help improve your visitor’s experience. It will also identify how many pages you will need to create for your site.