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Planning Your Web Site

A big part of the struggle first-time site owners have is deciding what your site ought to contain. You likely have some ideas of why you need a site, but fewer ideas on translating the why into the what:  what content you need to write, how detailed it should be, and how should it all be organized?

The process of figuring all of this out is often best done the low-tech way - grab some paper and a pencil.

Step 1: Goals

There are two things you will need to establish up front: your goals and your visitors’ goals. First, you will need to define what you are looking for from your site visitors. What is your goal when they use your site?  Take a piece of paper, turn it on its side (landscape), and divide it into three columns.  In the first column, write down your goals; the fewer points to it the better.  You are more likely to craft a successful site, and be able to demonstrate its success, if your goals are clear, simple, and measurable.

Once you have your goals in mind, in the right-hand column write down the central goal your audience has when visiting your site. You may know why you need your website, but you have little chance of success unless you can determine a genuine reason why they need your website.  Ideally you will be able to capture this core goal by writing down a single phrase.  If you have more than one target audience, you should deduce a goal for each one.  Be careful though - if you try to target too many audiences with a website, you risk diluting the potency of your site in reaching any audience at all - better to develop multiple sites than try to be all things to all people.

Step 2: Supporting Goals with Information and Features

It’s time to fill in that middle column.  What you need to write here is a list of information or features that your site ought to have to help fulfill your goals and your audiences’ goals. Information are things like product information, how-to guides, or your mailing address. Features are a bit more general, such as “regularly updated news,” or a bit more technology specific, such as “embedded video” or RSS feeds.
Again, as with your initial goal statements, keep each point brief.  You can come up with as many as you like, but don't expect to use more than a few of them for each audience directly on your site. This would also be a good time to talk with anyone you may already know that you see as part of your site's audiences-to-be.

The next part of this step is to draw arrows that connect the ideas from the middle column with the goals in the columns to either side.  Ideally each idea will connect to at least one of your goals and at least one of your audience’s goals.  Reconsider ideas that can’t, or at least flag them in your mind as items that will need to be revisited to see if they prove themselves useful once your site has been online for a while.

If connecting these two sets of goals is difficult or impossible, you will need to reevaluate your expectations from step 1.  The more honest you can be with yourself about goal compatibility now, the fewer headaches you will have later when building and managing your site.

An Aside: The Story

Storytelling is an age-old method of communication.  We are attuned to the shape of a story arc, and gravitate to a cohesive and well-told yarn.  By contrast, we notice inconsistencies, either consciously or as a vague sense of dissatisfaction.  We expect plausibility, and tend to doubt the storyteller when that expectation is not met.

You, of course, are the storyteller.  The underlying premise of your Story (your site) is your visitors' goals.  You shape the narrative of the Story towards the conclusion, your goals.  Yet the Story is not yours; sites succeed because the Story is about their audiences, not themselves.  As you shape your site, keep in mind that your visitors are coming to it with their own needs and wants in mind, not yours.

Whether your visitors stick around depends on whether they see themselves in your story.  This is why your site cannot be all things to all people -- too many subplots, too much extraneous information, slows the narrative to a crawl, wears down the peaks and fills the valleys of your story until it is flat, lifeless, unappealing.

The story metaphor will be more or less explicit depending on the nature of your goals.  For a site promoting a product or service such as Renao, for example, the story involves showing how the service is just the right solution for a particular kind of user.  Why it works for them.  The happily-ever-after comes when they decide to sign up for the service and find that they have joined a community of like-minded people who will help them further their goals.

For a site owner whose goal is to provide specialized information in a specific area of interest, the story is either one of recognition that the site visitor is already an enthusiast in this area, or an invitation to the curious visitor to become one.  The happily-ever-after scenario here is when the visitor finds what they were looking for, and recommends the site to friends and colleagues as the go-to source for this kind of information.

Step 3: Ideas into Pages

First, take a look at the list in the middle column.  We aimed for fairly broad ideas of what would work to support both your goals and your visitors’ goals.  It’s time to get a little more specific.  Start a new piece of paper; for each item in that column, write it down and expand it, bullet-point style, with brief phrases about what that item entails.  Bullets can have sub-bullets.  The point here is to explore the extents of each item, and the implications it has for the amount of information that may eventually exist on your site.

Now, decide what bullet points on your list should be grouped into single pages. You do not want to devote any given page of your site to too many topics, but you also need to avoid breaking your topics down into too many distinct pages.  Site page count is not a virtue unto itself, and your visitors will not appreciate needless extra clicks when topics could have been sensibly grouped on a single page.  One of your responsibilities as site owner is finding this balance.  Circle groups of bullet points to indicate how they should be grouped page-wise.

Where you have items that, given their complexity or their depth, require multiple pages, you may want to consider creating a collection.  A collection is a handy way to aggregate a bunch of pages, files, etc that have a common theme or function.  Each collection has their own mini-homepage, which you can use to introduce the subject the rest of the pages within the collection detail. To indicate a collection, circle the pages (themselves circles around groups of bullet points) that should belong to the collection.

Step 4: Designating a Homepage

Once you have determined the pages you will create from the ideas in your middle column, you will need to pick out one of them to represent your homepage.  First, from your goals column on the left, select the goal that is most important to you as the site owner.  Then, choose from the visitors’ goals on the right the one that is likely to be their most frequent goal.  Finally, find the page on your new list that best captures both the circled goal on the left and the one on the right.  If you cannot find one that seems to be a good fit, you’ll need to go back to step 2 and reconsider whether your goals and your audiences’ goals align.

Step 5: Building your Site Navigation

The page you have selected will be your homepage.  If things worked out right, the remaining pages in the column will be either tangential or secondary in importance to the chosen homepage.

Nearly all sites have a menu of links (we'll call this 'navigation') at the top or on the side of the page that help visitors find their way around.  Pick 3 to 5 of them that seem the most important.  These will be your navigation links.  On a fresh piece of paper, oriented landscape, create four columns.  In the first column write down your home page idea.  In the second column, order your navigation links in such a way that might reflect how your visitors could proceed through your web site.  For items that are collections, repeat this process in the third column for pages that belong to those collections.

Navigation as Story

This is a key place you can continually remind people about your Story (from the aside, above).  If we translate our metaphor to the theater for a moment, we can look at this list of links as acts in a play.  Using your navigation to move your story along is a bold move, as it will likely leave off a number of links you would have otherwise expected to find there.  Which brings us to our next point.

Utility Links

There are some links that visitors expect to find on any site.  Back-story about your organization.  How to get in touch with you.  A link back to the homepage.   These are important to have, but don't further your story.  I call these “utility links” and you want to make sure they’re available without dominating your navigation. Try putting them at the end of your navigation, where they will be easy to find, but won’t interrupt the flow of your navigation-as-story. Also, on a Renao site, your logo is a link back to your home page from any other page on your site – a common convention that eliminates the need for a “home” link on your navigation.  For advanced users I would recommend placing utility links in the footer of your pages, and leave your primary navigation to tell your story.

Step 6: Finishing Up

You may have a few remaining pages left that didn’t make it into the navigation hierarchy you’ve just built.  That’s okay.  You can still link to them from pages that are in the hierarchy, or your visitors can find them using your search engine.  Put these pages in the last column on your paper and draw links to them from relevant pages in the hierarchy, if applicable.  You should now have a fairly comprehensive map of all the content you have planned for your site.  We’re ready to move on to building your site.  A couple of tips before we go:

Prioritization

Rule number one when organizing the information on your site -- the answer to the question "what are the most important points on your site" is not "everything."  One of the hardest things you will do as owner of your site is winnow down the voices and initiatives in your organization competing for center stage. Keep in mind though, that your site visitors don't care that you have dozens of Very Important departments or projects.  The Story is about them, after all.  If you've succumbed to cramming everything you do onto your home page, your visitors won't be able to find themselves in your story, even if they're in there somewhere.  Streamline. Prioritize.  Rely on your site's search engine to help visitors find things you don't highlight.

Presenting Information

When writing your pages, consider a long standing technique that can be adopted from newspaper journalists.  In writing their articles they add progressively more detail the farther along a reader chooses to go.  At each stage (headline, sub-heading, introduction, etc) the author provides more detail about the topic at hand, while still capturing the sense of the whole story at each stage.  This allows the reader to quickly decide if they're interested in the topic without committing to reading the whole article for fear of missing a critical part of the story.

Now, with the map of your new web site in hand, let's go build it.