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Here are the simple steps for planning your website:
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Identify the Goals of Your Website
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Identify Your Audience
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Create a List of Content That You Both Achieve Your Goals and Be of
Interest to Your Audience.
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Divide This List into Pages
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Draw a Chart of Links Between Pages
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Create a Navigation Scheme that Links these Pages Together in a Simple
Consistent Way.
Identifying
the Goals of Your Website
Do the following
exercise:
| Right
now, take a piece of page and write out a list of goals you want
for your website. Next, take that list and combine it into one or
two sentences. |
Back to
our previous example. Lets say you have an interest in nature photography.
So you write down the following goals:
I want to meet other photographers.
I want to show others my work so they can critique it.
I want to teach others about my expertise in nature photography.
I want to create a forum for people to exchange their photos and experiences
with others.
This can then be distilled down to:
I want to create a forum where I can exchange ideas with other photographers.
Identifying Your Audience
Next, you need to identify who is your audience. It may be family, friends,
potential employers. In the example above, it would be nature photographers.
Create
a List of Content
Do the
following exercise:
| Create
a list of all of the content that you would like to include on your
website that both achieves your goals and would be of interest to
your audience. At this point, just write whatever comes to mind,
do not try to organize it. |
Divide
the List Into Pages
Now that you have this list of content, organize it into pages. You
can do this by organizing your ideas by topic and placing one major
topic per page. Remember, unlike a paper document, a website is nonlinear.
That means your audience doesn't read it from cover to cover, they will
jump around from topic to topic in whatever manner suits them. This
means that each page should stand on its own to some extent.
Draw
a Chart of Links Between Pages
Now that
you know what basic pages will make up your site do the following exercise:
| Take
a piece of paper and draw a box that represents each page of your
website. Now draw lines between the boxes showing how you want the
pages to connect to each other. |
Look at
the following illustration:
In this
illustration of our imaginary photographer's site, you can see that
all pages are linked to each other.
Create
a Navigation Scheme
Once
you have created a chart that shows how all of your pages are linked
together, you can now create a navigation scheme that links these pages
together in a simple consistent way. In the example above, all of the
pages are linked to each other so in this case you might want create
a set of links that is at the top or bottom of all of the pages.
Now that you have planned your site, you are now ready to get down
and design it. The next section will show you how to make your site
look good.
 Previous:
What Makes a Good Site
Next:
Tips on Design and Layout 
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