5 Steps to Planning Your Website

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Make sure your site is maintainable
One great feature, that I did briefly mention with designing without tables is the fact that without using markup to style the elements on your page, the code to design these elements all sits in once place and effects every element assigned to that code using a class.

The benefits to this are, if you ever need another element like that, be it a button, a special type of link, you are only going to have to write out a little bit of code.

In the beginning I was blind sighted by the fact that I wanted to use fancy fonts on my buttons as an example, I was very pleased with the effect after the site was done. But down the road, having to update the site become a nightmare having to open up a image editing package and create a new button, instead of being able to type one little line of code.

So when designing your website, keep in mind how you can simplify things, not only for now, but in the long run too. Designing a new site is lots of fun, maintaining it is like washing the dishes, so try save time where ever you can.

Give priority to your certain user groups
With your website, you are going to have different groups of people visiting your site. Depending on the type of your site, your priority will lie. Should you give more importance to people browsing your content, or people wishing to exchange reciprocal links with you? If your site is focused on affiliates, you shouldn't be spending most of your time trying to attract direct customers.

Once you have all your groups in order of priority, think how they can work hand in hand, and how they each 'feed' off each other.

Set and understand the goals of your website
Make sure you have the goals for your website clearly laid out right in the beginning, you want give most of your time to the most important parts of your website, not waisting it on trivial stuff.

Is it vital that your users click through to your sales page, or is navigation and ease of use more important? Obviously if your site is commercially driven, one of your top priorities will be generating revenue for your site, and below that goals that you will need to reach in order to reach your main goal, such as placing your refining your Adsense position and creating better sales copy.

Make sure you have these goals clearly set up so that you have something to work towards. Not planning is planning to fail.

Get different perspectives
Being in the field that you are, you often develop your own lens, and see things differently to what the layman does. More often then not, these are the people you are going to be targeting, so get their opinion, this is not to boost your ego, so let them know they can be very critical!

Plan for the future
Make sure you have planned on a set naming convention for all your files in your website. For example, don't name images like 'c1_34.jpg' looking back at that in a couple months time and you are going to be baffled, use descriptive names like 'bg_header.jpg'. Make sure that you cross browser compatibility is working early on, thankfully this is becoming a little bit easier with Internet Explorer 6 numbers dwindling. A great tip is developing for standards supporting browsers first! If you are writing your code by hand, be thoughtful as to how your write it, always do things as though you are doing it for someone else who has no knowledge of your project.

No matter how small, or large, planning right in the beginning is always going to save you time. If you have to second guess how to do something, there are going to be a lot of inconsistencies in your work, causing a lot of headaches.