Plan for Success!
Like any good project good planning is essential to a successful project. Planning for a website is no different. This need not be complex for smaller projects, but it will help you get what you need for your business or organization.
There are some basic items that should be agreed upon before you spend time, money and energy on developing or redesigning your site.
What is your project objective? Build a new site? Update content on your existing site? Redesign your site? Or just a bit of clean up to fix broken links or out of date content.
What does your organization need? If you are buidling a new site, what is the purpose of the site (read more on this topic)? Is your site intended to simply share information? Generate sales? Provide customer support? Prioritize them--you may have to make some choices. Agreement on these questions will ensure you get what you need for your business or organization.
What does your customer need? What
are their goals when they visit your site? Get information? Buy
product? Make a decision? Report a problem? This is crucial to your
design. Prioritize these too.
What is your competition doing? It's always good to know what the other guy is doing. Your website is no different. Do you look any different to your customers? What do you have that they don't? How can you differentiate yourself from them? Can your site encourage your customers to choose you over the other guy?
Who are the decision makers?
You want to be sure don't get well underway in your project find out that a key player is not onboard with your approach.
Develop a schedule. There's nothing
like a deadline to get something done, but a realistic schedule is also
important for a quality product. List all the tasks, assign a name and
set a date. You website designer can lead you through this but will
probably need input from you and of course both you and your designer
will be assigned some work to do. Write down the key dates. Check it
every week!
Set a budget. Aside from limiting
how much you want to spend, a good budget will help you set priorities,
define what you can and cannot do and provide a basis for controlled
change. Every plan will change, the trick is making changes
deliberately to keep it under control. Break your budget down into
managable pieces. Write it down. Check it every week!
Next Step: Design your site