Planning a Website

Be sure to organize the site well; think of your Home Page like the Table of Contents page in a book. Make it easy for the visitors to find what they are looking for.

Planning a website is much about the design and layout of your site's pages. Try to keep a consistent look throughout the site and put some serious thoughts into what fonts and colors you are going to use, background and pictures etc.

Then you have to figure out a name for your web site. If you're about to start a business online you probably would like to have the business name as the name of your web site.

However, when choosing a name of your site, it should also be available as domain name if possible (as you would like to have your site name like the domain name). You can check if your planned name is available as domain name at Namecheap.com (where you can buy your domain name, too).

When planning a website, you need to think about the structure of the site. Try to decide how many pages you want to have on your site, and choose descriptive titles for them. Figure out what you will have on every page (header, footer, logo, navigation bar or links etc.) so you can make one page ready (a template) and then copy that one for the other pages.

It's very important that your website is easy to navigate. All your links should be obvious to the viewer, and should be self explanatory or have information about where the link will take them. Always link back to your homepage in order to make navigating your site easier for your visitors.

The most important part of planning a website is to determine what content to put on your web pages. The visitor must feel that the content is informative and of high value to him/her, if not s/he will go elsewhere.

All this done, you are now ready to actually start building your website.

Go from Planning a Website to Building a Website