How to Create a Website Plan

A website plan is the blueprint for building your site.

A website plan guides the design and development of a new website. The website plan documents the goals, structure, appearance and content of your website. Marketing and budget sections are important for business website plans. Start with a well-thought out plan and you'll increase your odds of having a manageable and successful project.

Instructions

1. Determine the primary purpose of your website. Write down what you want to accomplish with your website. According to Hostway.com, defining website goals helps keep projects within scope and provides a basis for measuring success.

2. List visitor action goals. Ask yourself what actions a site visitor must take in order to fulfill the purpose of the website. These actions become your visitor action goals, which inform the layout and flow between pages of your website. Visitor action goals can also be used to measure the effectiveness of your website. For example, if you need visitors to take three actions to create a new account and you find that many visitors are exiting your site after the second action, you can redesign the website in an attempt to increase the number of visitors completing the third action.

3. Create a site map. List the main content pages or sections of your website. Create a diagram showing the relationships between the main content pages. Develop a navigation scheme describing how your site visitors will move between pages of your website.

4. Develop a graphic design theme. Visit sites comparable to yours to get an idea of the existing graphic designs being used on websites covering related subjects. Hire a graphic designer if you aren't comfortable choosing colors, layout and typographic elements.

5. Identify content sources. Will you write or produce your own content? Will users contribute content? Or, will you hire others to produce your content? Create a list of your content sources and a timeline for getting the content produced and ready to publish.

6. Write a marketing and promotion section. In order to get visitors to your website, you'll need to promote it. Be sure to include paid sources, such as pay-per-click and banner ads, and free sources, such as search engine optimization and social media, in your promotion and marketing section.

7. Prepare a budget section. List your recurring website expenses such as hosting fees, bandwidth fees, storage fees and domain name fees. Also include your one-time or variable expenses such as graphic design costs. If your website is an income generating site, list your income sources and estimated revenue for each income source. A budget can be helpful even if your website is a hobby or not-for-profit site because the budget tells you how much money you'll need to operate your site.

References

• Hostway.com: Develop a Web Site Plan