Planning your website

Overwhelmed by the process of planning a website?

Bringing your brand or business to the endless depths of the web is the most exhilarating first step to bringing your vision and creations to life, but it is not without its challenges. Creating a website is a huge undertaking project that requires planning and a structure of a vision of how you want your website to function. There are things to consider when preparing your next big project. Such as picking a hosting provider that fits your wants and needs, knowing the kind of message you are trying to portray to your target audience, and having a goal for the success of your website.

And that is where I come in. I am writing this to be a guide to make certain you have your cards laid out as you begin your planning of your online space to maximize effectiveness and success, and to help make the process as painless for you as possible.

I will be breaking the process down into three different areas of thought. These include your brand, your sites functionality, and the logistics of your site. So grab a pen and some paper and lets start working out the key details for your new webpage!

Your Brand

Your brand is the most important factor, as it is what connects you with your audience and includes much more than just your logo and a font you really fancy. Smaller details including the colors, tone of voice, imagery, and the overall style and feel of your website is all reflective of your brand.

While your brand goes far beyond just your website, if you do not have an established brand identity, now is the time to start establishing one. Before planning your brand, there are a few key things to think of.

Who is you audience and what are they looking for? What emotions are you trying to appeal to in your audience? Are you targeting a very niche subset of individuals or are you going for a broader scope with who you target. What does your brand mean to you and why does this matter to your audience? Now if you’ve gotten this far you see there is more than just “Oh, I’m just going to make a website in 10 minutes and call it a day!”

After establishing the basis of your brand, you will start to have more thrill with bringing that vision to life. Whether you are working with a brand strategist or bouncing ideas off of a friend, you will need to start applying the decisions you have came to for your brand, and flip it into what will be on your website.

What colors are unique to your brand? I always recommend my clients pick 2-3 colors at most. If you overwhelm your site with a thousand colors you will take away from the purpose of your site as people will just see a sea of colors and not the true intent of your site. What overall style does you want your brand and website to give off? Are you ultra minimalistic and clean-cut and straight to the point, or more rugged and edgy and like to make people work a little more? Does your logo fit in with this style? Face it, a logo of a pizza slice has nothing to do with interior designing. What kind of tone do you give off in your online writing, whether that is the more conversational tone, where you seem more sociable and personable, or cut and dry, where you get straight to business.

Another consideration in mind is your imagery. Does it make more sense for your brand to utilize illustrations or photographs? As far as these images goes, the possibilities can be incredibly overwhelming and confusing to clients if your websites imagery does not match the intent of your website. Again, a slice of pizza will not draw attention to an interior design site. You can use portraits and other clean photography styles, icons and line drawings, full animations, and so much more than just your average picture. It is up to YOU to decide what you think works best for your vision.

Finally, what story are you telling with your brand? Are you aiming to sell a product or service? Or perhaps are you just looking for like minded individuals that share common interests and exasperations. The story to your branding will ultimately tie everything together....Come on, that’s the whole purpose of making this site, right?

As you are going through these areas, you will notice that they tend to work off of themselves in their own ways. Your colors will reflect on your styling choices to an extent and those same styling choices will lend themselves better to some forms of imagery over others. The best way to go about branding is to mix and match your different ideas and elements you would like to portray and see how they all play together as a whole.

While this is barely scratching the surface of branding, it is a good way to get you on the right path to a successful site. Once you have a solid plan in motion for the branding of your site, you can begin thinking about the features and functionality you want out of your site.

Features and Functionality

Every website will have different levels of needs based on your brand, the structure, and your overall goals for the future of your site. An E-Commerce site will have much different needs than a site hosting a forum or a personal blog or portfolio. It’s all about what your site will be entailed to!

What is the goal of your site?

If you are selling a product or service, how will you take payments? Are you selling a variety of products to where your site will benefit from a filtering, or search feature? If you are selling an E-Book or other digital goods, will you be emailing the client your product yourself or will you want an automated system in place? If you have physical goods to sell, will you need inventory management for your site? These are just some of the things you doing initially think of, but definitely need a game plan for.

Will your clients have a log in for the site? If they do, what will they have access to after they log in? Will they be able to login via Facebook account, like all of the new age websites? And how will your users be authenticated in a safe and secure way? How are you storing your customers information? These are key components in bringing clients back to you, no one wants to go to a site where it looks sketchy and unsafe for both the user, and their electronics motherboard. Plus no one wants to wake up to a hobo on their couch because some website gave out all their information. But hey, what do I know?

The possibilities for features and pages your site will ensure are endless, and ultimately in your hands. With that being said, how do you know what you need? Does the message you are trying to portray need flashing lights and a disco ball? How about, do you need multiple pages for different categories included in your site. A lot of this brainstorming comes from a combination of your branding and marketing strategy. While looking at your brand, story, and your marketing funnel, it should point you to key components of what you will need. Examples of some of those key components include:

Store Pickers
Shopping System
Blog
Content Management System
Google Map
Contact Forms
Social Feeds
Links to external sites
Database
Specific pages (about / contact / store / blog)
Image Sliders
Email Marketing Capture Forms

If you have already established how you want your sales funnel to operate, it can be beneficial to deconstruct your funnel to see which exact features you may need. If you’re trying to sell a book, you are not going to have them sign up to go through hoops to end up with a free floor mat.

There are a tons of different features you may want or need for your website. You are not expected to know what your exact needs or wants are, but to have some ideas for your developer to go off of can kick start some brainstorming between the both of you. Identifying these needs early on the process removes the risk of changing course mid project, and ultimately deciding that this is not what you want to do.

Although some features may be more appropriate than others, and some will just make sense as a road way to meet your goals, they are vital factors in the success of your website. If you feel stuck, it helps to look at similar websites in your niche, or even sites that just plain inspire you and jumpstart your mind for the vision you are trying to achieve. You may find that it is a good idea to look at what features you are inspired by, the pages they are implementing, and if possible, you may even have the opportunity reach out to them and ask questions, in turn guiding you down your decision making.

Logistics

Now lastly, the final area to consider when planning a website is the logistical aspects of it. Logistical aspects are things that include hosting, collecting your assets, and registering the domains of your website.

Reality is, determining a host to use can be challenging. Some of the features and specs may be foreign unless you are web savvy, and some may just want you to rip your hair out and quit all together. Do not do that. Always be weary that sometimes looks can be deceiving...just like that solid 10 on Tinder might be a solid 3 in person. It can be incredibly easy to get dragged into hosts that may not be suitable for your vision or are just plain toxic.

Hosting providers offer a ton of features that are usually on different paid tiers. Some of these features include:

C-Panel administration (Admin panel for your website)
Custom Email for your domain name
Free domain with hosting package
Database hosting
Tech Support
Free SSL Certificates (basic security feature of websites)
Free credits for services such as Adwords
Disk Storage
Statistics and more

During this phase, I highly recommend working with your developer to make the right choice to get the most out of your site that you can. There are tons of factors based on individual needs, and levels of service that some developers can offer. One such is the use of static or dynamic data on the site.

Dynamic data would be something like Facebook or Reddit. Everyone logging in has a different content and different experiences. This would need a server and back end to function. Static sites are the same for everyone for the most part. Same thing. Same content. Black and white. There is a level of customization in experience on static sites. It is far less than dynamic sites, but may be suitable for most users needs; unless you are making the next Facebook or want to be the next Tom.

There are actual benefits to having a server. Servers provide private real estate for your databases and business needs. This wills tore confidentially and safely, and give your viewers more of a peace of mind. You can query dynamic data by users in a database and give a custom experience sit for the individual message you are portraying.

However, they do come with their own setbacks, and need monitoring and maintenance in order to keep it running as smoothly as possible. Storing data on users can lead to catastrophes, like the recent Facebook situation where suddenly everyone knew where both you and your mother, and even your grandmother lived. Yikes. Servers can also slow down and affect site performance without proper handling or notice to failure.

Great news! There are alternatives to this.

In some situations, you may not even need paid hosting or a private server. All sorts of sites are migrating towards Static Site Generators. Static Site Generators is a technology that websites can be build with that can forgo without the use of a server. These style of sites offer a pretty solid middle ground between static and dynamic sites.

This may seem limiting and intimidating. Rest assued, there are many services available to perform these functions. There are ways to connect server functions and databases to static sites. It’s 2018. We got this. While not dynamic in the correct context, it is more than enough for most peoples needs.

Assets include the bulk of what will make up your website. Ranging from logos and images to web copy and domains. Attention grabbing web design usually stems from having your content throughly worked around them as to not take away from your design, nor the content you have shared. It is crucial to start collecting these assets early to keep your project on track and inline with your goals for success.

Your domain name is another more ambiguous piece of a website for people. When choosing a domain name, you will want to pick something easy to remember, relevant to your brand and one that is scalable. Back to that pizza slice. No one is going to got to ILoveGreasyPizza.com to design their home. There are many services available to register domains with, and, personally, my recommendation is Namecheap. They even have a search function that allows you to check what is available so you don’t end up with a copy right lawsuit on your hands when your website blows up all over the internet.

Now if you’ve made it this far, congratulations. While some of these things may be a bit beyond your comfort level, and at this point you may even feel that this is not plausible for you, the end of the story is that having an idea of what you want when you initially meet with a designer or developer can help them better understand your needs and better guide you to creating the exact vision you have worked hard to bring to life and put it out there for the world to see.

Still want that website?

Fact of the matter is, the process of getting everything together for a website can be daunting and seem absolutely impossible. It is a big decision, and one that I do not think you should try to figure all out on your own. It is okay to need help and you might find that reaching out will bring an abundance of ideas to your personal vision. Partner with your designer or your developer, identify your goals, research other sites similar to what you are looking for, and brainstorm. You are not going to wake up one day and have everything cut, dried, and laid out. This is not a chicken dinner. The point is not to go in with a full blown plan in your head that you are dead set on, further not accepting any changes or suggestions made by progress along the way. Rather, have a good head start with a direction. If, during the process, you nail exactly what you want, that is not bad either, kudos to you. I would not count on that happening without at least 1 change and that is okay! I still suggest partnering with your developer to work with them on the implementation to gain the full value of your vision.

To help ease the process, create a checklist of what you need to plan out and create a file, either on your computer or in the cloud, that you can start collecting assets in, screen shot inspiring sites or cool features, store font ideas and more in. This will also give you another good head start when you need to hand these off to your designer or developer, and also give them a better direction to guide you in , as you both begin this website. It is your unique website. Make it your own.

In the midst of all of this, do not forget to have fun with your website, don’t forget to make it reflect you and your brand, and try not to be weighed down by all the overhead that comes from a website especially if it is not exactly how you envisioned your website. If you approach it tactfully, informed, open minded, and early, the process is nowhere near as intimidating as it could be.