Free Web Site Design Planning Checklist

Take some time now and think about what your marketing objectives are for the web site and how you want to use it. Identify your target audience and how they will be accessing your site.

Designing for dial up customers presents a different set of constraints than designing for the high speed connections of business users. This impacts the color pallet, the file sizes, and the use of animation.

What image do you want to convey? Professional? Whimsical? Newsy? Have you seen other sites that look like what you want? Site layouts typically fall into three categories: three column tabloid, two column information or splash screen.

The three column tabloid is meant to look like a newspaper or newsletter. One column is for navigation, one for content, and the third for events. This design construct is perfect for organizations with a lot of information to organize and present. One example is the tabloid web site we designed for the Porter Ranch Neighborhood Council.

The two column information site design is appropriate for most businesses. Often a narrow column contains the menu or a graphic and a wider column contains the content of interest.

A site with a splash screen is one where the home page starts with a static or animated graphic that must be clicked on to get to the rest of the site. Some site owners believe that this makes them look more sophisticated. Some users consider it an annoyance. And some marketing and web site design usability specialists consider this as just one more obstacle between the user and what they are looking for. You decide. Read more about splash screens and web site design.

You also want to consider the positioning of your menu. Horizontal or Vertical? The horizontal menu allows you to present more content. The vertical menu allows you more flexibility in adding menu items.

Think about what information your customers are expecting to find at your web site. What questions do you regularly answer that would be valuable information for your site? The writing is the most important part of the web site design process. You can greatly speed this up by thinking of the content categories. Then find the material you already have.

Your existing material might come from hard copy brochures, client presentations, customer letters, information flyers, case studies, customer testimonial letters or your resume. Armed with this information, we can help you organize your content into intuitive categories for your users and draft easy to read compelling content.

You want your readers to easily understand your content. So we use a conversational writing style. Concise. Specific. Informative. And free of jargon. We follow writing guidelines described by Robert Bly. Read his entertaining review of web site writing.

Do you plan on people finding you by giving them your web site address or by searching for you online? Will your site be key to your word of mouth business? Or are you expecting to increase sales through web traffic? If you want to drive traffic to your site to increase sales, we need to consider this in the site design and content development.

Search Engine Optimization is the art and science of designing a site and its content to be found by search engines. Site optimization begins by identifying what search terms your prospective customers would use to find you. Then we see how we can provide content that includes those terms. We need to understand this before we start writing.

Search engine results are greatly improved when you provide valuable links to other sites for your readers. And when other sites identify your site as a valuable resource by linking to you. Think about what sites you can link to and solicit links from.

A word of warning: Search Engine Optimization involves refining your site against an ever changing list of criteria (106+ criteria in the Google algorithm alone). Your competitors are always improving their sites as well. These two dynamic forces mean that no guarantees can be made. Results take time.

If you have already registered your domain name, now is the time to find your site access information. This information includes FTP publishing access with a URL or IP address, user name and password. Access to your control panel for review of site statistics is also helpful.

Now would also be a good time to make sure the registration of your domain name is current. You would not want it to expire in the middle of the project.

If you have not yet chosen a domain name or hosting provider, we can make some suggestions and work with you to complete the set up.