PLANNING YOUR WEBSITE (STAGE 1)

Not sure what type of website you want?

The first step to develop your website plan is to ask yourself the following  questions.

Who will be your visitors?

Will they be searching for information, products to buy or maybe both.

Whatever your website will be about, take a look at your competition, did they do a good job in the planning of their website?      

Is their website user friendly?   

Could you improve on it?

Are you able to easily find information you are seeking?   

How is their website design? - is it difficult to read?

too many graphics?   

What: are you going to write about? Even though content is king, you need to make sure it is relevant to your site. For most people, writing the content is a difficult task.

Write down your keywords and write a couple of sentences to start you out.   

NOTE  : If you try to build a site with limited knowledge on the theme, you will need to do a lot of research for content. By building a site around a theme you have a lot of knowledge in, you will have no problems filling many pages with relevant content.    

When: do you plan on having your site ready? Set a realistic goal and try to stick with it. If you set a goal of 30 days to get your plan completed and you are getting close to that time, don't publish the site if it is still under construction. The website traffic that is able to find your site could be a lost because your site is lacking the information you said was there and it is not and 9 times out of 10 they will not.

How often will you update your site? Some information can change quickly, you may want to update it weekly or monthly. I have been to many, many websites that show up in the top 20 places in the search engine but some of the information contained is outdated and usually that is the information I was looking for, so I had to keep searching.   

Why do you want a website?         

Keep family and friends updated?   

Sell your own products?

Make money?   

Retired and use all the knowledge you learned over the years to help other people?

Have a medical condition that other people may also be suffering with and have found information that has helped you?   

Have a wedding planned and want to keep everyone informed?

This will be the biggest motivator for building your website. You need to have a topic that you are interested in. By creating your website with something you are interested in, the site won't become stale with outdated information.