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Planning
: What you need to know before you start.
Before you jump in and start building
a site. You should probably first sit down and think
about what your goal is. Ask yourself some questions
first...
- What is your service/product/resource?
- What's your motive?
- Who are you pitching it to?
- What is your audience demographic?
- How will your site be different to everyone else's?
With these questions answered you
will want to plan how the site is to be constructed.
Consider what topic and subtopic areas need to be covered
and how will you structure this so that its easy for
the visitor to navigate quickly to the information they
are looking for. You might want to create a tree diagram
if the architecture is likely to be quite complex.
Think about your layout. What colours
and style you are going to use and why and be careful
to compose your pages with your brand image and audience
expectations in mind.
It helps if you can use strong visual
or textual keys like bold headings and images so that
the visitor is always aware of where they are in the
site. Sometimes colour coding is worth employing: by
choosing and marking each topic area with a colour to
develop a visual and quite dynamic way of navigating
a site.
You're going to need to create some
copy (actually quite a bit is going to be best for search
engines, perhaps between 100 and 300 words per page).
Try to break this down into topics and sub topics.
What else can you do?
Assuming you have hosting which can
run scripting languages such as perl and php, you might
want to consider some other effective ways of making
your site worth visiting:
News pages are a good way of keeping your visitors
up to date with your latest products, services or ideas.
Mailing lists so your visitors
can sign up and be sent emails with news items and special
offers.
Guestbooks allow your visitors
to give you feedback info.
Forums so your visitors can
converse with each other and swap ideas about your service
or product.
Just some ideas of what you could
add to make your site more "sticky". All of
the above can be downloaded from sources all over the
Net and installed with very little previous experience.
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