Distinctive, effective and inexpensive website design for small business
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The following checklist contains most of the things you should consider when planning your website.
What is the primary purpose of your website?
Who makes up your target audience?
How do you want your website to look?
What layout do you want?
Where do you want your navigation (menu) system?
Logo
Content
What menu items do you need?
Search engines
Technical details
Maintenance
Timing
Other
What is the primary purpose of your website?
- Describing your products or services?
- Completing sales transactions?
- Offering customer service and support?
- Communicating company identity or branding?
- Establishing your credibility?
Who makes up your target audience?
- Who do you want to see your site?
- What is your target audience looking for?
- What questions are your customers constantly asking you?
- What can we include that would wow your customers?
How do you want your website to look?
- Professional? Whimsical? Newsy? Simple? Complex?
- What do you like about those sites?
- What colors do you prefer for the site?
- How wide do you want your site design to be?
- Do you want your pages to be easily printable?
- Do you want to offer PDF files of information rich pages?
- Do you want your site to use only graphics, only photos, or both?
- Are you interested in animation files?
- Do we need to take photos of you, your staff, your services, or your products?
- Do you have any vendor supplied photos or graphics you are authorized to use?
What layout do you want?
- three column - navigation, content, miscellaneous. Good for organizations
- two column - narrow column for menu, wide column for content - good for businesses
- splash screen - click animated graphic to access the site - not recommended
- free form - not recommended for businesses but okay for personal sites
- flash - interactive Shockwave Flash sites have major search engine problems
Where do you want your navigation (menu) system?
- Horizontal menus are limited by screen width but allow you to present more content below
- Vertical menus allow you more menu items and greater flexibility in adding menu items
- Free form menus will not be expected by visitors so stick with the two forms above
Logo
- Do you have a logo?
- Do you have a digital copy of it?
- Do you need a logo or would your company name be sufficient?
- Do you have a tag line - a short sentence that describes your business?
Content
- What are your customers expecting to find at your web site
- What questions are you often asked by customers?
- What existing material do you have?
- hard copy brochures?
- client presentations?
- customer letters?
- information flyers?
- case studies?
- customer testimonial letters?
- your resume?
- Is this material available digitally ie. Word documents, jpeg images etc?
What menu items do you need?
- Home?
- Services-how many?
- Product categories?
- Customers?
- Testimonials?
- FAQs?
- Forms?
- Articles or other informative topics?
- Pdf files to include?
- Links or resources?
- About us?
- Contact us?
- Others?
Search engines
- What search terms do you expect your customers will use to find you?
- What search engines will they be using?
- What organizations, companies or sites can you ask to link to your site?
Technical details
- Have you registered a domain name?
- If so, do you have your domain access information ie. username and password?
- Have you secured hosting?
- If so, do you have your site access information ie. username and password?
Maintenance
- How often will your site need updating?
- What content will need updating?
Timing
- When would you like your website completed and "live"?
Other
- How will you be accessing the site (connection speed and browser)?
- What screen resolution do you have ie. 1024 pixels x 768 pixels?