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Planning for a website

Preparing

You have already learnt about the fundamentals for creating a website and the way to choose appropriate color

schemes for the text, images, backgrounds etc. So now its possible for you to start working on your website.

Starting work on the website does not mean jumping on the computer and opening up Dreamweaver. It needs a

lot of planning.

The first and foremost step in beginning to plan for a website would be to have a meeting with the person for

whom you are creating the website. You may be creating the website for yourself or for a client. If the website is

for a client, you will need to discuss his requirements and ask him some questions such as the following ones:

-what are your goals?

-what do you know about your target audience?

-How much textual information will the website contain?

-what kind of images will be added in the website?

-Whether Banner advertisements are to be added?

-what should be the content of the inquiry forms?

-How navigation between pages is to be done?

According to the briefing provided by the client, you can start the preparation. While Preparing, you need to list

the goals outlined by the client for creating a website. The list of the goals should include some of the following

points:-The goal should represent the client’s objective. 

-The goal should be specific. Being specific means, the goal should not be “The client wants to create a website.”

It should be “The client wants to create a website for the Central Mall”. 

You should be able to visualize the website. Try to jot down all the points you find necessary for the website if 

possible try to sketch them.

The website should be able to clearly help the end user understand the subject/services being provided.

An effort should be made for making the website stand out differently when compared to any other competing

services online.

Ultimately the website should attract the target audience.

Target audience: The target audiences mean the people who will be viewing the website. When it comes up toattracting the target audiences, an important question is, “Do you know who the target audience is?” If the

answer is “no”, you are missing an important step while planning the website. You should know about the target

audiences.

The guidelines regarding your target audiences could be:

-Is the target audience male or female?

For example- The website for a female oriented product could be different than one for a male oriented

product.

What is the age group of your target audience?

For example- The website for a kid’s brand could be different than one for an adult’s brand. 

What are the demographic details of the target audience?For example- The website for people from rural area could be different than one for people from an urban area .

Once you know what the goals are and who the target audiences will be, you’ll be able to decide the theme of 

your website.Mapping the Website

Visual Mind map: After you have thought about the goals and target audiences of your website, you can go to

the next step of planning your website. The next important step is creating a visual mind map.A visual mind map

is a flowchart which starts from the centre of the chart and spreads everywhere around the chart.

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 In the website planning, the visual mind map plays an important role. To draw a visual mind map, write the

theme of the website in the centre of a drawing paper. Now as you think over the theme, you’ll find all the

topics that should be in your website. Write them on various branches spreading all over the page. You can add

sub-topics to the topics in more branches to the theme. In this way the ideas will keep on flowing and your mind

map will start spreading all over the page.

The visual mind map you create on the drawing paper need not be pretty and sophisticated. It is enough even if 

it is clean and neat. Make sure that you can explain what is written and what is the meaning of the written stuff.

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To create a mind map, you can refer some of these sites :

-http://www.mindgenius.com/

-http://www.mindjet.com/index.html?lang=en-GB

-http://www.mindtools.com/The next step for the planning after the visual mind map is the creation of a storyboard. A storyboard is like a

series of drawn sketches in the form of frames which represent a sequence of a story. In the storyboard, every

frame is different from the others and each one conveys a specific message.

In a website, storyboard can be of different types:

1. Hierarchical Storyboard : In a Hierarchical storyboard, the first frame is placed at the top, in the centre. All

other frames are placed below in the top to bottom manner. For example : 1 on the top, 2 and 3 below the 1st

and 4, 5 and 6 below the 2nd and 3rd frame. Usually such type of storyboard is used while creating websites.

The frames at the third level are connected to those at the second level and the frames at the second level are

connected to the first frame.

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2. Linear Storyboard: In a Linear storyboard, every frame is placed after one another in the “1 -2 -3 -4 -5”

manner. They look like some pages of a book are placed in a consecutive way. In such a storyboard, first frame is

connected to the second frame, second frame is connected to the third frame and so on. Such a storyboard is

normally used for articles in the website.

3. Wheel Storyboard: In a Wheel storyboard, the first frame is placed in the centre. All other frames are placed

around the first one. They are connected to the main frame. Every time you want to move to the next frame,

you need to return to the main frame. This storyboard looks like a wheel and so it is known as the Wheel

storyboard.

Website Analysis

A Marketing Plan: Last but not the least, after the storyboard, you need to think about business or publicity or

hits that your website should attract.

There are number of ways in which you can increase the visitors to your website. Some of these are:

a. Submit your URL to various popular search engines.

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b. Submit your site, to special indexes that list services in categories.

c. Make your site good for the search engines, so that it is displayed at the top of the list when a related search

is done. This involves choosing the right keywords and adjusting your page title, meta tags and first paragraph.

Meta tags will be explained in detail later.

d. Consider paying for hits. The good news about listing in the search engines and indexes is that its free. The

bad news is that you dont have much control. There are, several places that can provide you with well-targeted

traffic for a fixed amount a visitor. Some of the favorites are Yahoo Search Marketing and Google Adwords.

The feedback: Once that you created the website and people know about it, the target audiences would

definitely visit the site. You should be able to know about the people visiting your website. Google is offering a

service in which youll be able to view and analyze the visitors of your website. It is known as Google Analytics.

Google Analytics helps you to track the users who are visiting your site. It provides information such as the pages

visited, the time spent on a page, the browser used, the country that user resides etc. It also displays a weekly

graph or chart which helps you to analyze whether the website is underperforming. You can refer to the link :

http://www.google.com/analytics/ for more details.