Buyers Guide | Planning | Principles | Marketing | Search engines | Getting Help
Plan your website before you make it. If you fail to plan you plan to fail.
What is it for? What messages do you want your audience to hear?
Who is it for?
The more clearly you understand your audience the better to communicate with them.
There are all kinds of websites that serve specific purposes for their owners and visitors. The more clarity you have about your site's purpose the better!
Know your visitors - what are their likes and dislikes?
Who are these people that are going to use your website? Are they young, old, groovy, reserved, religious, wealthy, holiday makers, business buyers, marketing executives, shared interest groups, in another country?
Will you want to use images, text, audio, video, catalogues, shopping carts, special offers, news, newsletters, information sheets, opinion articles, community notice boards, competitions, downloads?
What style will you use; informal and friendly or reserved and official, first person or third person?
Will you want to make daily, weekly, monthly updates, to one or more pages?
Will you have many people contributing content and submitting it for an editor to review before publishing?
A decent website design will generally follow a theme throughout.
There are no limits to the potential themes that could be created so your designer will want to provide you with a theme that suits your organisation.
Your website theme should reflect your logo and business profile and is usually a continuation or evolvement from your present printed theme.
If your site is larger with different sections you may want a new theme for each of the sections. For example if your target markets are rock music fans and traditional folk music fans then you may want to have two sites each themed for the specific market.
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