When planning, Ask Yourself These Questions

Plan Your Website Before You Start Building It

Before you roll up your sleeves and start designing Web pages, take the time to examine your motivation for creating a website and to develop and refine your ideas within the context of what's possible to build your website. In the process, don't even think about tools and utilities of how you would build it. To build a great website, ask yourself these questions.

Website Planning
Website Planning is one of the most important steps of brain storming phase and is mostly about setting a plan for your site building project. This is a fundamental step-by-step business plan for the entire process.

Without a clear plan you will not be able to get the job done. Even if you finish it, it could turn out to be a disaster in terms of time and money spent. After setting goals for your business and generating some ideas for your website such as your site type and topic, then you will need to follow the goals and commitments step by step. You should know how to get started, what the steps are, how to collect the needed information, tools and resources and how to get the job done.

Ask yourself these questions?
Grab a pen and a piece of paper and ask yourself these and other questions that come to your mind.

Why are you building a website? Is this a new idea, after doing online research and you did not find one in existence, or there are other websites of similar nature but you want to improve upon their effort? That means who will be your visitors?

Do you know enough about the topic so, down the road, you can come up with fresh content? By building a site around a theme you have a lot of knowledge in, you will not have any problems filling up many pages with relevant content.

How much time can you dedicate to your first website? You need to write at least once a week if not twice or three times, on the subject you have chosen for the website.

How personalized do you really want your website to be for your hobby or business?

Do you, eventually, intend to make money off of it if, let's say, it is a website of information by placing advertisement on it?

Maybe you want to build your first website to keep in touch with family and friends, or your church. Maybe you want to sell some services and products, make money online. Or you could be like a friend of mine who, after retirement, is in the process of building a website to record his experiences about his work so that a new person comes on board in that field can benefit from it.

After determining answers
After determining answers to these and other questions you might come up with, you will be ready to set a complete plan for your website. f you do not like writing, use an application such as the Free Open Office word processor to write down your mind map.

Always be as organized as possible. Build your step-by-step plan, put it in front of your eyes and stick with it. Along the way, as human we all learn slowly and gradually, be quick to make changes to it. However, your basic plan must remain the same. That way, you will exactly know what to do every time you want to work on your project. You could have a medical condition and you want to share your information and experiences with others about it.

I have written a few other articles about the need, the objective, the different types of website to give you a better idea so you have some information about creating a website. Go through those articles before you start building your first website.

In a Nutshell
You can ask yourself a question. Do I feel .... Seriously, the question must be "what are you basically trying to achieve?" One of the biggest problems when building a website is how to work out and communicate what your site is going to do and who is the site for. You can save time and money by focusing on the very basic reason why and what you want to achieve with your website.

Always remember what a great guy once said - with a little twist of words.
"Ask first not how you can do a job. Ask first what you want to do and why."