PLANNING YOUR WEBSITE

 

What Makes a Good Website


In general terms a good website will meet clearly identified goals and provide compelling, dynamic content for it's visitors.  In addition to this the site will be easy to navigate with an attractive yet generally simple design that compliments the content.

1. A Good Website is Compelling: It provides value to your audience that draws them to your site again and again.

This is most important.  Think about the sites that are very popular like yahoo or msn.  They provide you with a reason to return. They have compelling content that is always being updated.   They also provide links to other relevant sites, and are easy to navigate around.

Always remember, you want to give your audience a reason to stay, and of course return to your site.  Try putting yourself in the place of your intended audience.  If you were them what would grab your attention?   What sort of information would you be looking for?   What would make the site of real value to you?

Let's say for example that you own a nursery.  You could include a picture of the week, or a link to a photo gallery that changes with the seasons.   You could also include handy hints and tips for budding gardeners, and of course an easily navigated set of pages that include prices, specials and the ability to order products online.

2. A Good Website Meets Clearly Identified Goals

You need to identify exactly what it is that you wish to achieve with your website.  Typically you will be looking at your website as a tool to grow your business or publicise your organisation.

3. A Good Website is Easy to Navigate

No matter how intriguing the text, or beautiful the presentation, if a website is not laid out in such a way that  it is easy to find what you are looking for you will have significant problems.

It is very important that your website is easy to navigate.  You need to assume that your audience will not enter the site from the home page.  This means that there should be no dead ends with every page having a consistent, easy to understand, set of links that take you back to other pages.

4. Visual Attractiveness of a Site

This is probably the area that most people concentrate on first whilst not paying enough attention to having interesting, dynamic content, defined goals and easy navigation.

Of course humans are very visual beings and so we do want to make our site attractive to the eye.  Remember however, less is often more.  In particular don't fall into the trap of cluttering your sight with lots of pictures, animations or flashy text.  Apart from significantly slowing down the all important speed at which your site loads, too much visual stimulation will only overwhelm the visitor and distract them from your sites important information.

How to Plan Your Website

We shall now look at some of the things you ought to keep at the forefront of your mind when you are planning your website.

First up you should look at doing the following:
Note – for the last two points enlist the help of some friends.  Get them to look at your website and that of your competitors, and ask them for feedback.  Find out what they like and don't like about the websites.
   
Here are the simple steps for planning your website:
Identifying the Goals of Your Website

Try doing the following exercise:

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

Identifying Your Audience
You need to be able to identify who is your target audience.

Create a List of Content

Complete 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 :

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.

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.

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