Web Site Planning

Planning is an essential part of any web site. Spending longer on the planning phase of a web project can save a lot of time and headaches during the design and development phase. It is a good idea to determine a clear vision of the end product before development begins, to avoid duplicated effort, design iterations, and spending time with trial and error in the development stage. I would like to share with you, the planning process I use for personal web projects. Feel free to comment on this article, and contribute your own thoughts on the planning process.

Web Project Planning Phase

Your tasks and processes may differ depending on the scope and the objectives of the web site you’re planning for. I find the tasks below are always involved in the planning phase of any web project, and the process I use fits well with personal web projects.

1. Needs Analysis

   1. Goals & Objectives

      The first part of the planning phase is to define the web site’s goals (increase the number of customers, promote yourself to a wider audience, etc…), and the objectives (to receive 20% more bookings per month, to receive 10% more subscribers per month, etc…) which need to be achieved to reach those goals. This will determine the type of web site which would be suitable (ecommerce, blog, directory, etc…). All decisions made from the rest of the tasks involved in the planning phase should coincide with the goals and objectives outlined here.

   2. Target Audience

      What type of web users are you expecting to visit the web site? Who are they? It is useful to list everything you know or could expect from your users, for example, age, sex, industry, attitudes, habits, tech savvy, devices they use to access the site, likes and dislikes, etc… This information is useful when tailoring the design and content for a richer user experience, creating effective calls to action, and deciding on appropriate technologies to use (social media, mobile features, etc…). This information can also be useful throughout the life of the web site, maybe for targeted advertising or a redesign.

   3. Tone

      How should the site be perceived by the target audience? For this I usually list words and terms that would delight and install confidence in the visitors use. For example, friendly, fun, warm, professional, active, etc…

2. Information Architecture

   1. Scenarios

      Create a number of user scenarios. Think of as many tasks as possible that your users might want to complete, in a number of instances. For example, finding directions to your business quickly, via there mobile.

   2. Competitive Analysis

      Discover competitors and review their content, features, and functionality. What works? What doesn’t. What could be improved?

   3. Identifying Content & Functionality

      For gathering ideas on content and functionality, we can take the information we have already obtained through the competitive analysis and scenarios we’ve conducted. What could be removed, added or modified to improve the users experience and help achieve the objectives. A method I use for this task is to create a content inventory. You might need to edit the content to help set the tone of the web site, mentioned earlier.

   4. Content Hierarchy

      Knowing what content is needed, begin arranging the content into groups of taxonomies based on users needs. Which taxonomies are more valuable to the users and the web site objectives? Does some content fit into more than one taxonomy? Card sorting could be use to prioritise the content and taxonomies.

   5. Define Navigation

      Create a user friendly site structure for pages based on the scenarios and the content hierarchy. This will help define the site map. What taxonomies (groups of content) are to be included on what pages, and how might the content on one page relate to other content on other pages ( card sorting could also be useful here ). With a site map defined, global navigation and local navigation should be looked at closely to ensure users can complete the tasks they set out to do easily.

   6. Wire Framing

      Arrange the contents of each page by prioritising its importance to the users and your objectives. Where will the navigation, headers (h# tags) and images be placed, how the UI functionality will function, transactions between user actions and the server, what about the size of elements on the page, etc…

3. Design & Development

   1. Design Sketching

      Sketch out ideas for visual metaphors, logos, and other elements. How can the design convey relationships between other content on the page? How can the importance of specific elements be displayed? etc…

   2. Colours & Branding

      What are the branding elements and colours to fit the tone and target audience.

   3. Technologies

      What technolgies will need to be used and why. Technologies for ads, CMS, UX. For example, ajax used for form validation.

Conclusion

By completing this process you could create a useful design and development spec or/and a timeline for development tasks. Either way you should end up with enough infomation from the tasks above to develop the web site with a clear vision of the end result, and enough insight to achieve the web site objectives.