What is your purpose for having a web site?
Who is your intended audience?
What is your budget for your web site?
How do you want your users to respond to your site?
Do you have a company image your trying to convey?
How should the site be structured?
What are the limits of the technologies on the Web?
How do you think people will search for your site?
What is your schedule for completion?
How do you plan to promote your site?
How do you plan to maintain your site?

What is your purpose for having a web site? (to inform, to sell products or services, to entertain) This is a basic question yet it should be one of the first you must answer. Any meaningful business endeavor needs an objective and planning in order to avoid wasting costly time fumbling through the process. On a basic level, a business needs to have a presence on the Internet as a means of improving their company's communication and in turn increase profit. In addition, there is an increasing expectation of your clients to be available on the Web. A business owner needs to determine what are his or her particular reasons for their site and what they want to accomplish with it. If you don't have to be informed of some common reasons why a business needs a web site, you need to take the next step by answering more specific questions regarding what you need to know in planning you web site. If you don't have a specific purpose for your site, the site will be one of many out there that do not effectively help their business. For three examples, look at the objectives of Ted's Tires, Custom Tools Manufacturing or Sarah's Outdoor Clothing Company. (back to top)

What is your budget for your web site? ($800-$2K, $2K-$5K, or $5K-$20K, or $20K-70K, etc.) The answer to this question will depend on the level of work you choose to invest in the production of the site and the funds available. You will at least have to provide or generate the content and ideas to be incorporated into the site. If you have the talent in-house and the relatively inexpensive software, this may allow you to be less dependent on service providers for your site in the future. The advantage of a professional developer is that it's their business to know how to apply the up-to-date techniques and how to guide you through the many facets of making an effective site. A service provider can inform you of some the costs of a web site including web development pricing and Internet Service Provider (ISP) charges as well as help you to determine what are more specific benefit of having a service provider develop your web site for you.

Some times it is better to determine a budget range before learning about all the dynamic scripting (increased functionality) and enticing bells and whistles (entertaining options) that you could get in your new "home." As you learn more about how the scope of your site correlates to the relative cost you will get a better idea of what range that actual cost will be. If you choose a service provider to help you, they can give you base line costs for various types/sizes of web sites and show you web site examples that they can produce for you. (back to top)

How should the site be structured? The structure of a site relates to how the information is organized into various pages that are linked together. Once the information (content) to be included is developed, the structure can be sketched out to suit the content. On the other hand, specific content can be made to fill in the framework of the structure. Your "Home" page is the index page where the visitor will see the links to the other pages containing more thorough information. The pages linked to the index page will tend to be like a root system yet having some links to connect the remote root pages with each other or the index page.

The art of web design is to structure a site so that it is easy to figure out how to navigate (get from page to page). Well-chosen keywords and phrases that link to other pages with pertinent information are a basic need for easy navigation. Also the artistic elements of the site can help illuminate the structure of the site in addition to make the site more enjoyable to view. (back to top)

How do you think people will search for your site? (strategic keywords and phrases) Listing a number of strategic keywords and phrases that summarize your business is helpful for a number of reasons. The different keywords will help your developer to know how the site should be structured. The terms and phrases will be placed in each page's meta tags to assist search engines in directing people to your site. Anticipating how a person interested in you products or services might search for your product will help increase the likelihood that they will reach your site. (back to top)

What is your schedule for completion? Setting a deadline is important for a number of reasons among them being it will allow you to give a completion date for your promotional efforts. Your developer can help you know what is realistic for the scope of work planned for your site. When you know a web site can be put online in a matter of minutes, it's easy to fall into the trap of endlessly perfecting the web site before it goes online. An established deadline can always be adjusted, but it's better to make the deadline and improve the site in the future. (back to top)

To learn more in-depth information on how search engines work, visit www.searchenginewatch.com.

How do you plan to maintain your site? Web surfers want fresh information and they want it on a regular basis. With easy access to any of the hundreds of new sites put online each day to satisfy their demand for new and interesting information, visitors will tend not to revisit a site that has out dated information. For this reason, some level of updating pages on your site is important. You'll need to determine who will be responsible for the updating, what pages will be updated and how often. Sometimes merely posting when the site was last updated will give the viewer a greater sense the site has current information. (back to top)

Planning Your Web Site
This document of questions and comments are intended to be used as a clients guide to making informed decisions. The questions are aimed at helping you define the objective of your web site as well as informing you of issues that factor into making a purposeful web site. With an investment in having a presence on the Internet, thoughtful and informed planning will greatly help in accomplish your business's objectives.

Would you like to see this document as a PDF? (worksheet included)

Technical questions about your anticipated audience such as what size monitor and what speed modem they may have need to be answered in order to determine reasonable web pages dimensions and file sizes. The brand of browser and version will greatly impact the new technologies that can be used such as HTML 4.0, JavaScript, Flash and Cascading Style Sheets. (back to top)

How do you want your users to respond to your site? (call, email, fill out a form, visit your office) It is always necessary to have at least your address and phone number for visitors to contact you. It is also important to be able to adequately serve your clients when they do start responding to you site. If you don't often check your email, you should change your habits, don't include your email address or tell them how often you check your mail. For those who want to sell products on the web, there are a number of e-commerce design issues that will ensure the site is easy to use and secure for making payments. Surveys and chat rooms can also be incorporated into a site if desired. Once you know the methods you want your visitors to respond, you'll need to learn about the ISP services that are available since not all ISPs offer a the same breadth of capabilities. Whatever methods you want to be able to provide the visitor, be sure you have a system in place before the site goes live. (back to top)

Do you have a company image your trying to convey? (professional, personable, whimsical, responsive) The web is a creative medium that can portray your company as professionals or amateurs. The design of your site can do good or harm depending on the effort and knowledge applied to its construction. The site can project an image of professionalism, integrity and quality or lacking credibility depending on how all the elements of technology and artistic design work together. It is said that the web is a great equalizer in that it allows the average small business to get the same exposure as the larger firms. This might be a strong argument for a professional to design your site unless you're a graphic designer with HTML knowledge. (back to top)

What are the limits of the technologies on the Web? Learning the limits of the technology determined in part by your site scope is another area your developer can be helpful to you. There are increasingly more effective tools that expand the uses of the web yet for any give technology there are constraints to their uses. Some limitations are in the given languages or applications that continue to develop, though more restrictive are those that result from the variability in user's systems. Each persons system is different with a different browser, browser version, browser preference setting, modem, monitor setting, etc. That means your site must conform to certain constraints in order to function on the greatest number of the various user systems out there.

You may want to have your logo to look the right color and page layout to look the same on every body's monitor screen, but that may only be approximately achieved. You may want to have your visitors experience video and sound immediately in front of their eyes, though unlike the TV, transferring things over the net aren't as immediate. There are eye-catching things that can be achieved with vector art (Flash) and there are truly "dynamic" features a site can have though these things cost money. Your developer can't teach you all the limitations of the web medium but can let you know what some of the limitations are as your visions for your site are made clear. (back to top)

How do you plan to promote your site? If you build it, they will come -This is wishful thinking. Driving traffic to your site is an essential part in the effectiveness of your site. With a specific purpose and focused promotion your site can be of the minority that truly has commercial success. A site without promotion is like printing literature and not distributing it.

The two general means of getting the word out about your site would be by conventional advertising methods or via the web. Conventional advertising would include printed materials (stationery, business cards, brochures, envelope, fax cover letters, mailers, catalogs, Yellow Pages, magazine ads) TV, radio and outdoor ads.

Promoting your site on the web tends to be cheaper than the conventional methods though stationery and other office materials are considered basic costs of doing business. In several cases, your time is all that is required to register with search engines, append emails with your URL, get involved with news groups, join or organize a web ring, arrange link exchanges with other related businesses or participate in free banner exchanges.

It's desirable to have your web site rank well with the search engines yet to achieve this is an art in itself that in most cases takes costly efforts and for the average web page designer is an ever-changing enigma. Professionals who design sites continually learn and apply the techniques that improve the chances the sites they produce will be indexed. There is no simple formula for creating a popular site since each search engine has a different method of indexing or cataloging web sites. Also, search engines intermittently alter the indexing criteria in order to give their users accurate search information. In the end, the best approach for a business is to have a well designed site that appeals to the visitor's interests. (back to top)