To help ensure you don’t miss any crucial steps in building your website, follow the simple P.L.A.N. acronym to create a web presence that will help you reach your home business goals.
What P.L.A.N. Stands For
To help you understand what your website will need, use the P.L.A.N. acronym: Prepare – Identify your target audience, appropriate website tone, and goals. Landscape – Think through how you would like your website to be able to function. More specifically, what features need to be on your site? Aesthetics – The way your website looks and feels is just as important as what it can do. Think about what colors and images you want on your site and how your site compares to your competitors. Navigation – It is important to plan how you want your audience directed through your website. By thinking through what pages you need and how they should be laid out, you will help ensure, early on, the good visitor experience.
How To P.L.A.N. a Website
PREPARE: Before you jump online to buy your domain name and web hosting to build your site, you need a plan. Pull out your business plan to help you with these steps: LANDSCAPE: Figuring out the “lay of the land” for your website is essentially determining which website features are essential and desirable to meet the goals for your website. To do that, you need to refer back to the goals for your website in the previous step. For instance, if you want to sell products, you are going to need credit card processing and a shopping cart feature. Features to consider include: Not only do you want to consider front-end features, but also, you’ll want to consider back-end features such as:
Integrated marketing systems such as search engine optimization (SEO) Security measures, such as an SSL certificate to help your visitors feel safeCaching to help your web pages load faster
You don’t necessarily need all of the features listed above. Again, you need to consider your market and your goals for the site in determining what is needed. AESTHETICS: Design aesthetics, or the way your site looks, is a crucial piece of the website creation process. Thankfully, most web hosts offer templates and content management platforms have themes to make this part easy. How to decide the look of your site: If you’re stuck on how to visually create the tone of your website, visit your competitors’ websites to see how they do it. You’ll get ideas on what to do, as well as what you can do better. NAVIGATION: Website navigation is the way the website pages and links are organized. Deciding your navigation structure before you build is crucial to designing a site that is easy for your visitors to use and to find what they want. To determine your site’s navigation: Once you know all the pages you’ll need, decide how you’ll make these pages easy to find. Most sites have a top and/or a side menu that appears on every page. Top menus tend to have more limited space than side menus, so usually, you want only your main pages (Home, About, Contact) and possibly your top category page links at the top. But again, you want to make it easy for people to find what they’re looking for. One option is to have a drop-down list from the top menu. Returning to the Cooking Store example, when a person hovers over the main category of “Utensils” on the top menu, a drop-down list of the sub-categories, “Knives” and “Serving Utensils” appears. You can achieve this through side menus using a nesting effect, in which clicking on the main category then opens the sub-category list below it. Include a search box on your website for the impatient person who doesn’t want to poke around to find what they want, or for the visitor who’s having trouble finding what they want.
Putting It All Together
Once you’ve completed your P.L.A.N., you’re ready to move on to the building phase. That starts with buying a domain name and web hosting, and then choose the theme that will fit your tone, and provide all the features you want to include. Once you’ve built your site, be sure to check that all pages and graphics load correctly. Test your forms to ensure they’re working. Consider previewing and using your site on different browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari), as well as on mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) to make sure all elements appear and work.
