How To Plan The Best Website In Four Simple Steps

How To Plan The Best Website In Four Simple Steps

According to every web professional and expert designer out there, planning a website beforehand is the single most crucial step towards a successful launch. This plan is called a Site Plan, and you can create it in four easy and necessary steps.

As a general breakdown, they are the following:

Step 1: Brainstorming Ideas

Step 2: Clustering The Ideas And Making Themes

Step 3: Creating Simple Outlines For Pages

Step 4: Fleshing Out A Document

Let's hop into the details! But first...

What's A Site Plan?

In terms of architecture, site plans are a bird-eye view of an empty piece of land. They predict and give an idea of what the ground will look like after completing a project. It has everything; all the details from parking lots to buildings and sidewalks. Such a plan prevents future confusions and time-consuming discussions because everything is already decided in the plan map.

Similarly, a site plan shows what a complete website will look like after it is finished when it comes to website designs. You make the difficult decisions, decide the details, and finalize everything so that nothing stops the process of building. Such plans include text, notes, images, and even videos to make it as detailed and precise as possible.

The final map or document is very valuable. Why? Because even if you don't make the website yourself, you will pay a professional to make it for you. Such an expert will probably charge an hourly rate, and having a mapped out site plan will save their time and your money. At Young Media, we map your website down to the SEO features (such as headers and footlinks) so that no stone is left unturned. We want to utilize every piece of this "real estate" so that it helps your business attract customers AND stay in the search rankings.

The four essential steps of making this plan begin with properly brainstorming and finding various samples and ideas for your website. Identify the different color patterns and designs in these samples and group them into different themes. Then, decide which themes work for you and apply them to various website pages. Add more substances and final touches and finalize a proper document that shows exactly what you want and how you want it.

Step 1: Brainstorming

After identifying your message and your target audience, look for decent ideas relevant to your domain and match your vibe. During this part of the process, pay particular attention to the details like your content, how you want to want to display it, etc.

First and foremost, look at what the top comparators are doing. Search up relevant businesses and websites and go through their platforms. Look into the details with a critical eye and gather inspiration from them. Please details include navigational ease, color palettes, and call to action phrases.

Now, take a notebook and a pencil and sit down to brainstorm.

Suppose you have a team or a group of people interested in your project, excellent! Gather them around and have a group discussion. Put forth your notes, opinions, and ideas and ask them for theirs. These small discussions will lead to massive improvements in what you originally had in mind and eventually result in an idea more significant than what you could have thought about!

However, remember to write down all of these ideas and everything you discuss in the gathering, not to forget anything later. We call this the Brain Mapping technique. We like to write ideas on postcards or post-it notes (preferred!), spread them around and arrange them on a wall or whiteboard, and then look at them collectively with this broader lense angle: this particular method spikes and sparks your creativity- try it!

Step 2: Create Themes

Once you have spread out all the notes and ideas on the floor or the wall, start grouping them in two different concepts and themes. You can do this based on concepts, color palettes, designs, patterns, and anything else that makes sense to you.

Examples of conceptual grouping:

1) You can group reviews and testimonials, product photos, descriptions, and video demonstrations of a product to create a product page group.

2) Similarly, you can group contact forms, news, and call to action phrases on the website's homepage group.

3) If your website has multiple different types of services and products, you can also group these to make subpages. Subpages create an organized cluster of broad topics and make navigation much more comfortable and user friendly.

4) You can also add photo galleries and maps as a group.

Remember that you might like a lot of ideas during this process and wish to implement them all. However, stacking different types of ideas together can create a mess both visually and for the SEO. At YMA, we work hand in hand with our search engine team to make sure your website structure is laid out in a way that is SEO friendly.

Step 3: Page Outline

Once your clusters are organized into pages, you can now choose a display method so that all of this information looks more readable. Bullet lists and outlines are the most popular and most easy-to-read formats. While organizing the pages, make sure you're only using five to seven most important and primary ones. This number is optimal and most popularly recommended due to the short attention span of most humans :-)

For real though, tests have proven visitors can only digest so much at a time, and five to seven, a maximum eight, are enough to provide all the essential information and keep the website easy to navigate.

Another essential thing to keep in mind is that visitors should smoothly find anything they are looking for without clicking any more than two to three links. Each click on top of this can increase the risk of your user abandoning the platform. They simply give up because it's too complicated and decide to go someplace else. So, make sure that when a visitor visits your home page, they can move around quickly, find what they are looking for within minutes, and finalize the transactions.

Step 4: Fleshing a Final Document

With your outline done, keep adding to the site plan in the form of notes and reminders. These would include precise information and milestones in video, text, image, or link form.

As for the other details of the website, you can keep adding them to the plan as you finalize them. These include the titles, names of the products, product descriptions, etc. While we're on the subject of headings, remember that these are very important for a website and that each page title should start with the H1 tag. Your SEO team should relay information on this.

The second title will appear to the visitors and show them where they are on the website, and the third title is more extended and relatively more descriptive. This third version of your title appears on the search engines and not on the actual website. Even though it might sound intimidating and overwhelming right now, several platforms allow you to enter these texts and titles without the use of any code whatsoever.

Conclusion

The resulting site plan you have now is your blueprint and your website's official roadmap. Now that you have finalized everything from top to bottom, you've already made the critical decisions, and the rest is easy. You and your website team will refer to this site plan for the rest of the process and make any changes and amendments as needed.

With everything decided and on hand, you can now start with the process of building that excellent website you've always dreamed of... or of course, hire YMA to build this for you!