Planning Your Website

At the very beginning the first question to ask is "What do I want my website to achieve?". This will be your main focus for the website and must be remembered at each stage.

Then we need to look at who your target audience is and plan accordingly so we can maximise the impact of the website on them. It is at this stage that we need to find out what people are looking for in the search engines and build the website around these keyword phrases. That is, if you are interested in Targeted traffic. You may just want your website to be a promotional tool for internal customers, or use it as a an online application for your staff.

The next stage is deciding on a site map. This is like a flow chart of pages that will be used as the structure of your website. Starting with the homepage and moving down. If you are using the technique to find out what people are searching for your product and services then try and make these keyword phrases (or variants of them) your page titles.

At this stage preparation of the content of your website, following the sitemap you have previously set up puts the detail into the website structure.

Along comes the design. This is a huge area where taste comes in many forms. One design may be liked by you, but not by another.

The design and content are added to each page designated by the sitemap. If a page has a functional purpose, such as a contact form, then the coding is added at this stage. The content is added to each page ensuring that the coding used is semantically correct.

We now have a draft site. So testing is important to make sure that everything is working as it should. We do a few search engine tests to ensure that the engines can see each page, we check the images load fast and the spelling is correct.

The site is now ready to go live and we need to promote the site to bring in traffic. There are many ways to do this but we are targeting links from other web sites, which are authorative in a relevant field, the page they are on is relevant to us and the anchor text (text within in the link) is one of our keyword phrases.

Through the proper use of statistics and Internet usage systems we can continually evaluate and update the website to monitor and improve the performance we originally set as our main goal.