One reason why planning your website matters so much for successful website development is that your imagination can create innumerable designs for the over all feel and look of the site.  There are 4 Steps to Website Greatness:

1) Plan.
2) Write.
3) Design
4) Manage.  

With so much to choose from, how will you stand out? Just having a website isn’t going to do it. Neither is buying into the get-rich-quick promises of some SEO (search engine optimization) salesmen or PPC (pay-per-click) vendors.   You’re going to need a top-notch website: one whose planning, writing, design and management sets its apart from everyone else.  It doesn’t have to be flashy, it doesn’t have to cost the earth, but neither is it something you can do all yourself or hire your next-door-neighbor’s grandson to do.

Mapping your web strategy is where a good web designer or consultant makes all the difference. Their experience will help you think of what you need — and what you don’t — saving you a lot of time and money down the road.

Part of the strategy you’ll devise with your designer will list what functionality you want, like a paypal solutions (to by sell, subscritions or receive donations) customer service area, contact form, database, etc. You’ll also look at what areas of content you need on your website: the usual suspects like “Services” and “About Us” plus more specific areas that showcase your specialized knowledge to your audience in areas like “Tips and Tricks” or “Articles”.

By showing your designer real examples of what appeals to you, you’re helping them build a website that’s better suited to your needs and desires.

Once you’ve launched your website, you can use analytics (traffic monitoring software) to look at how your site is performing against the goals you set. So if one of your goals was to get 15 people contacting you per month from your website, you’ll be able to see whether your site is delivering on that goal. If it’s not, you can look at improving your copy, or analyse where people are leaving your site before the contact page.

Take the time upfront and plan what your website needs to do, and you’ll be well down the road to an effective website. Then relish the fact you did it right and spend some of that extra cash on something usefull.

Remember that a Web site is a business tool, and like other business initiatives, it should be subject to measurement and analysis. Did it accomplish your intended purpose? Was it cost effective? What was your return on investment? Unless you are clear on your objectives from the start, it will be hard to determine the success of your site.

Here are some questions to ask yourself as you plan your website:

What are my goals?  What would success look like? Do you want to just provide information or sell products? I discuss the general types of website goals in my article What Makes a Successful Website

What is my target audience? If you are targeting the elderly you will want larger font sizes and more modem-friendly pages than if you are targeting corporate executives.

How much will I depend on search engines to generate traffic? Search engines like lots of text and "popular"; Websites the ones that lots of people link to. If you are going to get most of your leads from search engines, you will need to identify which search keywords you wish to target, as well as develop content and consider a reciprocal linking campaign (exchanging links with similar sites). The time and effort you'll need to spend on your search engine placement also depends heavily on the competitiveness of your keywords. For instance, if you are only marketing locally and your search terms look like “Web Designers Toronto”, it is a much smaller market and it will be much easier to get high rankings than if your keywords were just “Web Designers”.

How much time do I have for updating the website? Content-heavy websites need to be added to and updated to stay fresh and keep your customers coming back for more. Content management tools (CMS sites) can make this process easier by keeping your products or articles in a database which you can go into and update whenever you want to.

How are visitors going to contact me? Do you want to list your phone number and/or address on your website? This may be a privacy issue for you. A contact form makes contacting you easy if someone is not at their home computer.