What’s it all about?
First things first… There’s no point in starting your journey until you know where you’re going.
Planning is crucial for most things in life, but especially web development. To avoid unnecessary rewriting and rebuilding of pages, navigation and so forth, start by planning your website on paper.
What’s the objective? Who’s your target audience? What is the outcome that you hope to achieve?
What tone or mood are you going for? How do you want to come off: trendy, businesslike, gentle and warm, techie? Write a list of adjectives that describe your ideal website and then narrow it down to just a few.
What content will you be putting on your site? Content is super important. I’ll be revisiting this in a future post, but for now, think about what pages you’ll need. What are the key pieces of information that you want to convey?
And what about navigation? How will you organize this content? It’s generally best not to take the Yahoo! approach of littering your homepage with links… this will only confuse your user into leaving your page or clicking the first thing they see. Rather, we’re going for simple and intuitive here.
My suggestion: make an outline that shows all of the pages you plan to include in your website. As you do, think about what content will be on them and what the most appropriate page name will be. Once you’ve got your outline, think about which pages are most important. Which pages really need to be in your main navigation? How do you want the user to progress through your pages? Are your groupings logical and obvious, or did you put “Company History” under “Contact Us” because you didn’t know where else to put it?
Draw up your outline, edit it and then draw some more.