6 Essential Steps: Planning and Executing a Successful Website

Whether you are creating a new company website or starting a new web2.0 venture, you will need a plan of action to develop a successful website. Staying organized makes the website development process go smoothly and helps your team stay on track without going off on a tangent worrying about minute details. Planning also helps prepare for unexpected road blocks that could bring things to a halt if not foreseen. These processes have helped me over the years and I hope they help you too.

Here are the six steps to planning and executing a successful website:

1. Planning - Forming an Idea and Setting a Goal.
   • You have a great new website idea. You can see it all playing out perfectly in your head. All of the instruments strike every note in harmony in your symphony. This idea is so big you can maybe even see yourself making executive decisions from your cell phone on a remote island in the Bahamas. This can all come true, but you have to do your research first.
   • Research - Your great idea will succeed if it provides significant value. You just have to make sure someone else isn’t already doing it!
   • Competition is always healthy, but don’t go after a saturated market. A small amount of competition lets you know there is significant potential in that area, and other people are willing to put money on it. However, it will take too much time, money and effort to establish yourself and then start competing with the big boys if you go after an older market with established players.
   • Map it Out - Get your ideas on paper. Create a site map that visualizes each page in a bird’s eye view and explain the workings and function of each page. Getting a site map together will help you understand how the pages interact and organize the project.
   • Target and Positioning - Who is your audience? Entrepreneurs, local retail stores, bloggers, internet marketers? How are you going to approach them? Are you an expert in the field or just a fellow friend? Why are you better than the competition? What is your unique selling proposition?
   • Set a Goal - What are you trying to accomplish with this new website? Do you want to inform the public about a topic, do you want to start selling a product or do you want to create a new way to network?
   • Allocate the Funds - Just as they say, “don’t try to be your own accountant,” don’t try to be your own web developer. Anyone can create a basic HTML page in Dreamweaver, Frontpage, or even a simple text editor. But hiring an expert pays off. Things will get done right the first time, your site will be optimized for search engines and humans, and they can implement complex programming modules like payment processing APIs, message boards, forums, blogs, etc. You may also need some extra software that will enhance your website. Here are some examples of things you may need down the line:
     • Software
       • Shopping Cart
       • Message Board or Forum
       • Website Password Protection
       • Development Software like Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Textmate, etc.
     • Hosting
       • Domain names (you can purchase domains like mydomain.com, mydomain.net, etc. for under $10 a domain)
       • Hosting package (from $3.99 a month for simple shared hosting if you have less traffic to $100+ a month for dedicated hosting if you have lots of traffic)
       • Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate
       • E-mail addresses
     • Labor
       • Designers
       • Developers
       • Salespeople
2. Outlining and Content Creation
   • Design - Design isn’t just about making things look good. Make sure your website design integrates functionality and design. Construct your webpage to be “eye AND brain friendly.” Follow some design guidelines like the 7 +- 2 rule from StomperNet. Don’t overwhelm visitors with choices and keep things simple.
   • Content Creation - The core of all websites is the content it provides. The content provides the value and makes people come back to your website wanting more. Generally, the more content you provide and the more frequently it’s updated, the better off you are for gaining new visitors and being indexed by search engines. If you are developing a corporate website, deliver clear and concise messages that make a point. Although your company may have started in 1867, most people won’t want to read three or more pages about the years of history.
3. Development
   • Turn Layout into Working Site - Use the correct tools. Make sure the web developer uses the newest standards to create the website layout. XHTML and CSS (table-less design) are the best tools because they separate content from style, creating a semantic format for easy updating, search engine friendliness, cross browser compatibility and faster page loading.
   • Integrate Content - Copy and paste is the easiest way to integrate the text.
   • Dynamic Functionality - This the tricky stuff. There are lots of tools being used for dynamic websites. BizWidgets uses PHP and MySQL for dynamic websites that interact with databases. They are both open source which eliminate a lot of overhead like extra software or hardware (Ruby on Rails is another awesome new language, check it out!). There are other alternatives like ASP/MSSQL, J2EE, Perl, Coldfusion, Java, C, etc. We prefer PHP and MySQL because it’s popular and that means there’s a lot of resources if you get stuck and need help. There are also lots of code libraries and frameworks built (like CodeIgniter) which include standard website components and eliminate your redundant code.
4. Review
   • Revisions - Don’t be too optimistic and expect everything to fall in place the first time! Make sure you bugproof everything, test the website in different browsers, have friends, family, and coworkers go through the website. Everyone browses websites differently, and they will probably find a bug in a few seconds that you would never see! Review the content, design, and functionality to make sure things flow smoothly for a good end-user experience. Make sure you get a lot of opinions from people other than the development team because being involved in a project doesn’t give you a birds eye view of everything.
5. Implementation
   • Make it Live! After your design is complete and functioning 100% up to its potential, you can move it from your staged server to the real live website!
6. Promotion
   • What is a website without any visitors? Now that your great new website is done and bugproof, you need to show the world how wonderful it is. Of course, if you already have some credibility on the internet, that can help a ton. But even then, your website may not be an overnight success and you will need to promote your new venture.