Carefully planning your website will save you time and help you make a much better site. We have compiled a plan to help you map out your website. Keep in mind, this is not the only way to build a website, but rather a boost for your thinking process so you can get to work. To start, think about the following points:

1. Consider your motivation and your audience: Why are you creating your site and who will be visiting it?
2. Navigation: What is the strategy for navigating through your site?
3. Structure: What is the shape of your site? Is it meant to be linear or do you want to encourage roaming?
4. Design plan: What will the overall look be? Will the whole site share a look, or will parts have their own designs?

Initial Planning & Navigation

Unlike catalogues and albums, a website is not linear. This means that instead of flipping back and forth, you can access any page at any time. This can work for and against you. Keep in mind that not everyone accesses the Web like you do.

It may sound trite to think about cute little images or themes for your navigation, but good design and memorable images can really add to the success of your site.

Creating icons that represent these points helps your viewers navigate the site. Visuals play an important role in our memory. If visitors feel comfortable in your site and each page has some familiarity, they are likely to stick around and return.

Keep in mind that just because pictures look pretty and help people remember what they're looking at doesn't mean you should stick them all over the place. Not only will it bog down your site, but it may degrade your content. Use your images wisely and make sure they really serve a purpose, even if it is a decorative one.

Give your site shape

Next to navigation, the structure of your site is the most important decision. Try talking to someone about your goal, (or talk out loud to yourself if no one is there to listen).

Draw a picture of what you think the site should look like. Begin with your main page. Do you want a decorative welcome page that does nothing but say hello to your visitors and let them know they've arrived, or do you want to lay everything out at once?

It is up to you, though keep in mind that many people prefer less clicking. Now divide your site up into categories.

Picture your site as a tree. The main page is put into the root directory, so that's easy to remember. If you don't really have a lot of content, then your pages will all be the first branches that come out of the tree.

In the Pooch Palace, each branch has a lot of branches sticking out of it. You can get from one branch to another at any point, but you can't get from little branch to little branch without going through one of the large ones. This way you don't have tons of links everywhere, but rather an organized system that will make sense to you and your viewers.

Structure

Organizing your site will not only help your viewers keep track of where they are, but it will help you keep track of your files and create rules for keeping your site tidy. A messy website can be hard to figure out, and if you go back to fix something after quite some time, it could be really confusing.

After you find a good structure, name your sections and decide what should go in them. You don't have to worry at this point what each page in the section will be, just establish the basic content to help you create your navigation. Think about what sort of images, icons or multimedia files you think you might want to use. These files will need a directory as well to keep them together and make them easier to find and access

Design Considerations

Now that you have a basic shape to your site, think about the look you hope to achieve. This doesn't have to be specific, but think about whether the site will have the same overall look or if each section will have it's own identity. If you are sharing the design throughout your site, now is a good time to know. You may want to create headers for each page that are the same size, font and color.

It is much easier to do this at once before the pages are created. That way you can power through the creation of your pages, simply inserting the appropriate images and content. Of course, it is not the end of the world if you feel like making a change, it is just easier to start out with a plan.

Your Marketing Plan

Before building a website, ask yourself three basic questions:

Why are you on the Web?

This is a personal question as much as it is a business question. Think about it carefully, answer honestly, and you just might be successful (at the very least, you will be far less likely to waste valuable time and money.)

Who is your target, or who do you want your site to attract?

The Web audience is not only growing rapidly in sheer numbers, it's becoming increasingly diverse. As a marketer, you must decide exactly who you want to reach, looking at demographics and other strategic ways of defining your target. Is it upscale women 25 to 54, college-bound teens in the Northeast who spend 12 plus hours on the Web each day, or maybe males in Alaska with an interest in French cuisine? Regardless, the determination of your target audience will affect what kind of external links you make to your homepage, where you advertise your site, and what kind of content you include.

Another basic consideration is whether you're primarily targeting existing customers, likely "prospects," or both.

What do you want your site to do?

Define your goals. Make a written list of the specific things you want to make happen, with time periods for each goal. You can use your site to generate instant online sales, provide enhanced customer service, reinforce or revamp your company's image, recruit new employees, provide free services or information to build up goodwill, or create a valuable database of existing and potential customers.

Strategies involve making decisions as to how you will achieve your goals. For instance, to reach a broad, "ready-made" target audience, you may choose to use a commercial online service such as America Online or CompuServe. To reach a more narrowly defined audience, you might be better off tapping into your own or a shared Internet service provider.

Here are some online strategy guidelines that can help you as you draft your Web marketing plan.

Build brand awareness

The more people are aware of your company and the products and services it has to offer, the more likely they will be to buy.

To increase awareness of your website, and your company, you will want to funnel in visitors from as many relevant sources as possible. That means establishing "hyperlinks" with other sites that share your target audience, as well as listing your company on hot search engines such as Lycos or Yahoo!. Remember that the online world is a series of interconnected "communities," so keep this in mind as you develop awareness strategies.

It is also important to advertise and solicit public relations attention to your site. Advertising can be expensive, but it works, and you can control the message. Public relations can also be effective, but you have much less control over the message and how your company is presented.

Contact those media journalists-- both online and off-- who are most likely to cover your industry or company. Make a list of target media contacts and send them a press release or drop an email message inviting them to visit your site. Give them a specific reason to come, and make sure your site can deliver what you promise.

Direct response

In addition to building awareness, many marketers want to stimulate direct action. Direct-response techniques encourage consumers to order products, request more information, receive a sales call, and otherwise "get involved." Direct marketing also allows for efficient tracking and testing of various sales messages and the ability to generate immediate revenues-- today!

Tactically, you could provide visitors with a simple order form along with a secure means of payment. Or you could develop promotional giveaways or contests to generate excitement while capturing valuable customer information for future marketing initiatives.

Education

You already know how important it is to educate people about your products and services. But on the Web, you have to offer something more. Like it or not, to succeed on the Web, you have to give away information and services. People only go or return to sites where they can get something.

How can you serve your audience in terms of education? If you're a winery, you might provide free primers on what type of wine goes with what type of meal. If you're an accounting firm, you might offer free end-of-year tax tips. The point is, give something of real value to your target audience. In return, they'll be more interested in learning about your products and services and they'll have a better impression of you as a company.

Demonstrate your wares. When people clearly understand your products and services-- how they work and what benefits they provide-- they are much more likely to buy. If your product or service is complex, intangible, or not easily demonstrated, find innovative ways to give consumers a "taste" of it. Have fun. Be creative.

In conventional marketing, a product "trial" is usually critical to long-term sales growth. The Web, because it offers sight, sound, motion, and interaction, provides an inexpensive, highly efficient way to try out products and services.

Research

Research on the Net is not only cheap, it can help your business expand markets, fine-tune product offerings, improve customer service, and identify new trends and customer needs.

Use your website to solicit feedback from customers. Find out what they like and dislike and obtain valuable suggestions on how to improve your products or services. Try conducting inexpensive or free online surveys to answer all sorts of marketing questions that would normally cost thousands of dollars and take weeks or months to complete. But remember to offer something in return.

You can also tap into hundreds of existing online databases and newsgroups to strengthen your understanding of a new market segment or product area.

Service and support

To make commerce on the Net really pay off, back up your website with customer service and support. As much as possible, try to shift customers from telephone to online support, which is much less expensive, seamless, and the way customer service is trending.

Also consider developing internal service-support capabilities. For instance, many companies enable their salespeople to make sales presentations online. The salespeople can access great reams of product and marketing information that can be customized for a particular client or prospect.

Content, content, content

Content is what drives success on the Internet. It is the meat of what you have to offer (fancy design and creative graphics are the dessert). To attract your target audience and keep them coming back, you've got to deliver information-- the right information-- in a timely and organized manner.

Consider what your audience really wants to know. They probably don't need to know your company history dating back to 1973. More likely, they'll want the latest on industry news and trends, helpful tips and guidelines relating to your service or product category, or access to other information sources.

Obviously, you will want to skew content towards your products and services. The trick is to do this in a way that doesn't appear self-serving. Make the content meaningful, relevant, and ultimately helpful to your target, and visitors will return to your site again and again. They'll even thank you for it.

Decide who in your organization will be primarily responsible for creating and updating content. Once you've assigned a "content master" (maybe it's you), this person can delegate content assignments to other people or departments. But someone needs to be accountable for all that goes up and through your site.

Finally, take time to determine how and how often content will be updated-- daily, weekly, or monthly. There's nothing in cyberspace worse than a stale website