How To Plan A Web Site

November 19th, 2008 | by Conrad Walton |

No matter what kind of web site you are creating, no matter what size or what content, it’s always best to plan out what you need to do before you do anything.

I always start with a planning document. It can be formal or informal. It just needs to have all of the information you need in a way that makes sense to you.

Start out with the technical, web hosting issues. What is the domain name? Where will it be hosted? Are there any other technical requirements like SQL or PHP? You may not know all of these right now, but be aware of them. They might cause problems later if you don’t plan for them now.

Once you have a handle on the technical issues, which will take way more time to explore, the next step is a site map. This might be called the site architecture or site plan. There are various names for it.

You need to have a list of every page on the site and a description of the content for every page. You also need to know the relationships of each page, which will be defined with the menus.

Most sites have a list of things that are exactly the same on each page, so we call this the template. These things would be the header and footer, the sidebars, and the logo. Whatever else you might have can be put into the template.

If your site has nothing common on each page, then you’re better off creating them individually. You still need to make the site map.

You can make this list as a text outline or as a graphic with little boxes and lines running between them. Use whatever tools you have that make sense to you.