How to Develop a Site Outline

Your site outline is the key to organizing your site to be clean, clear and customer-friendly. You can pack a business website with products, content and all kinds of cool features, but prospective customers will stay away unless you develop an outline with a simple look and feel and stick to it.

Instructions

1. Start by creating a simple outline of your business, with all functions and elements of your business model included. Be sure to make it from a prospective customer's point of view rather than your own.

2. Let your homepage be the home base from which all activities begin and treat its "real estate" as a precious thing. Always lead with what is important.

3. Organize every page on your site so that it emphasizes five to six main navigational choices and no more. Do this by building tiers or hierarchies from the general to the specific and allowing pull down menus from main navigational choices.

4. Make product and content search and browse functions easy, seamless and powerful from anywhere on your site.

5. Reduce the range of navigational choices as your site brings a customer closer to making a purchase. Think "light at the end of the tunnel"--but always allow a customer to view the whole transaction while it is in progress, to save a partially completed transaction for a later session and to save overall payment, shipping address and gift settings, when applicable.

6. Create and print out template pages with uniform page elements to use as a guide as you develop the sub-pages in your outline. Each page should have certain elements in the same position, including your business name and logo, search and browse functionality, and a consistent top layer of buttons or links, such as "Product Categories," "Shopping Cart," "Your Account," "Top Sellers" and "Help."

Tips & Warnings

• Give customers what they want. For instance, your web hosting service's email form system may reduce your spam message count, but such forms may irritate good customers by keeping them from being able to use email to track their interaction with you. They may prefer a "Contact" button at the top of each page linked to a conventional email address. You can always protect your inbox with a good spam filter.

• Over time your business activities and natural expansion will put enormous pressure on the clean, well organized outline that you establish for your site from the start. Spend some time each week comparing the current state of your site to the original, cutting down on clutter, dying links and information that is no longer timely.