There are many benefits to planning a website in advance, and in FULL.
It’s worth spending some time on the planning stage of your new website. By taking the time to plan effectively, you can:
- Prioritise your budget and only use what’s necessary
- Ensure there are no surprise issues or extra costs during the build
- Save time by changing your plan as often as needed, before the build starts
- Save time and effort by getting all your relevant stakeholders and suppliers onboard with the same plan so there aren’t disagreements or misunderstandings during the build
- Make your website build process as fast and smooth as possible.
1. What is the objective of your website?
Why are you building this website? Do you want to sell more products, or get new sales leads, or maybe take online appointment bookings? There are thousands of reasons for building a website. You must know precisely what you want to achieve with your website, before you can plan anything else about it.
Try to keep your objective as simple as possible. It’s much easier to communicate a simple objective to everyone involved, and it’ll be much easier for everyone to understand what you want to accomplish.
If you can’t distil your website’s objective into a single key point, or a few, very specific goals, it usually means you aren’t very clear on the objective/s yourself. If you aren’t clear on what you want to achieve, then how will you communicate it to anyone else?
Keep rewriting your website objectives until they are extremely simple, for example:
- Sell dog toys
- Sell dog training courses
- Ask for referrals to new clients
These website goals are easy for anyone to understand and leave very little room for interpretation.
2. Describe your target market
Who is your customer? Who will arrive on your website and buy your products or signup for your newsletter?
- Where are they located?
- What is their income bracket?
- Do they do a particular job, or have a certain business role? (Example: Do you want to sell to HR manager or the CEO?)
- Is gender important?
- How old are they?
People love to say that their product is for absolutely everyone, but in almost all cases, this is not true. You might WANT to sell to every single person alive, but it would make everything about your sales process harder, and less likely to succeed.
If you wanted to focus on women, age 30-40, your message will be very different to a one that’s selling to teenage boys.
Your target market will influence factors like:
- What device are they likely to use when browsing your site?
- Do they prefer text, or video, or images?
- What social media channels do they frequent?
- What main messages will resonate with them?
- What calls to action best suit them?
You can’t build a useful website unless you know who you are building it for.
3. Can your website make your office work easier?
Do you sell a product that needs instructions to use it? Or do you spend hours every day compiling and sending out customised quotes? Both situations can be helped by your website.
Here are some examples of your website could do:
Issue 1 – Solved by planning your new website correctly!
Problem: Customers call often to ask the same questions, wasting valuable staff time.
Solution: Display ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ on your website, with a form so people can email any questions not covered in your FAQ. You can then add this new question to your FAQ and build a repository of useful information for your customers.
Issue 2 – Solved by planning your new website correctly!
Problem: You spend hours every day compiling and sending customised quotes.
Solution: Your website could be structured as an online quoting system where users could generate their own quotes as they needed them.
Issue 3 – Solved by planning your new website correctly!
Problem: Your staff waste time taking appointment bookings and chasing unpaid appointments.
Solution: Your website could use an online booking system that doesn’t confirm an appointment booking time until payment has been received. Payments are made by credit card, at the time of booking on the website, and appointments are confirmed automatically, while simultaneously updating your calendar.
Issue 4 – Solved by planning your new website correctly!
Problem: Your staff wastes time sending standard documents or instruction manuals to customers, every time they call to ask for them.
Solution: These documents could be stored on your website, and the links sent to your customers automatically.
Issue 5 – Solved by planning your new website correctly!
Problem: Your product is tricky to use, and customers call because they don’t understand the written instructions. Staff waste hours trying to explain how the products are used.
Solution: You could record videos of exactly how to use each of your products and load them all onto your website so customers could see clearly how they work.
These are just some ways a website could make your daily office life easier and save time and resources. There are a million more ideas out there to use your website to benefit your day-to-day work! A good web designer could help you to see what’s possible on your website, so you could plan to add these features too your site.
4. How will you measure your website’s efficacy?
This answer will tie right back to your website’s objective/s. If you know exactly what you want your website to do, you will be able to tell if it’s achieving that goal.
Be sure to stay realistic in what you expect from your website. Just publishing a website online with no marketing or consistent SEO will result in very low traffic, if any at all – at least for a while. By planning your budget correctly, you will know where to allocate marketing funds and how much to allocate to achieve the goals you want.
5. How will you track your traffic?
There are many different elements you can track on your website. You will probably want to know how many people visit, where they go on the site, how many sales you’re making, and where your traffic is coming from.
This can all be done using Google’s tracking products (Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Tag Manager).
But have you considered more detailed tracking?
Example: You want to sell products. Tracking how many you have sold is a great metric, but it misses many steps in the process.
What about tracking how many people added a product too their cart? How many made it to the checkout page and abandoned their carts? If you have a high number of abandoned carts, this gives you very important insight into your users’ behaviour. Maybe they didn’t know how much shipping would be and only saw it at checkout and decided against the purchase. They could be using their cart as a wishlist because you don’t have wishlist functionality? Maybe your products are too expensive for the group you’re targeting, and they would like to buy them, but can’t actually afford them?
Understanding what you will track, how, and why, will make it much easier to plan your website effectively from the start. You will know what issues you might face, and if there are things you can add to your build to mitigate the issues before they become significant problems.
You will also need to choose what tracking software to use, as you might need additional software (like a specialised, paid plugin to track and remarket to users who abandoned their carts).
6. Who will be responsible for all the elements of your website?
Time to decide on the logistics of building your website. Who will be responsible for writing the website content, and do they understand SEO? Have you considered who will be choosing images or videos, and do they understand your target market’s preferences?
Which company will actually build the website, and do they have the expertise to build what you need and want? Similarly, who will look after the site going forward? Who will make sure your website is backed up correctly, who will maintain the software and the content? Who is in charge of website security, and do they know how to track attacks and what to do in case something goes wrong?
This team will largely depend on your budget and how you decide to allocate it. Ideally, you would choose experts in these areas. However, you might not have the budget you need and will have to make some tough calls about what to prioritise.
Remember, you always pay in some form – whether it’s with your time or your money. Use the website planning process to decide where your efforts and funds will go. If you don’t want to pay a professional copywriter, someone else will need to write the website content and it might be you!
7. How will you drive traffic to your new website?
No one will know your new website exists unless you tell people about it. This usually falls under the marketing budget and should be accounted for in the planning stage. There is no point in doing all this work if you don’t have a clear plan for how you will get traffic to your website. It’s better to reduce some website functionality and reallocate those funds to your marketing, than to have no marketing budget whatsoever.
Your target market will largely determine how you will market your website. There are lots of methods to choose from, and they will all likely be paid for in either your time, or your money:
- Search engine optimisation (SEO) – this is the process of optimising your website for search engines, so your site will rank higher in online search results in a search engine like Google. This is called organic search ranking and is more effective than paid ads.
- Google Ads – this is when you pay Google to appear in their search results in the ‘Ad’ sections. These results are not as effective as organic rankings and can get very expensive. There are also limited ad slots per keyword, so you’ll still be competing with other companies wanting to appear for the same searches as you.
- Email marketing – you could send a regular newsletter to all your customers but remember, you’ll need a database of people who have agreed to receive your information first!
- Social media marketing – there are MANY ways to do this. Your target market will determine which platform is best suited for your business. You could pay for adverts, or you could partner with an influencer. You could also run your own account and post updates yourself but keep an eye on the time this takes and whether you can keep your online branding consistent.
There are many other ways to market your website, like word of mouth, trade shows, TV, radio, etc. Whatever avenue you choose, make sure you have budgeted for it in your website plan.
8. Plan your website menu
The website menu structure is absolutely critical to any website plan, but is so often overlooked. Search engines and users all look to the website menu to evaluate what the website is about, and what are the most important elements of the business they are encountering online.
Your menu should be distinct, and your user (or a search engine) should be able to tell what your website is about and what you offer from your menu alone. This means that you must distil your business down to a simple, organised structure that would make it very easy for users to find the information they are looking for.
This is often the hardest step of all, but arguably one of the most important.
- This menu will help to determine the size of the website, which will impact the cost of the website.
- It will force you to understand your services and be able to explain them in an extremely simple manner.
- Your menu wording should align with the way people search online and the wording they use to look for your products and/or services.
What have you learned about how to plan a website?
Website planning can be a tedious process.
However, the more tedious the planning seems to be, the more it’s desperately needed!
If you are not able to communicate the answers too the above questions clearly and concisely, then your website build process will likely be long, arduous, and expensive.
Good website planning will save time, save money, and get everyone involved to buy into the same vision. It will help to prevent unforeseen costs and mistakes and will streamline the building and proofing process.
And remember, it’s MUCH easier to chop and change a website plan, than it is to change a website that’s in the process of being built or has already been built.
