With website planning, bear in mind the 5 P’s
Prior planning and preparation prevents problems

If you went to the bank, the manager would insist on a business plan before even considering funding your website.  This is for a sound reason.  Your website plan should include all the same probing elements as a regular plan

Four W’s – Who?  Where?  What?  Why?
Who are your customers?  Where are they?  What do they do online?  What products do they want?  What are there needs?  Why would they want to come to you?

In essence we are talking about a focused plan.   Focused on the demographic of your customer, focused on the needs and desires of your potential customers, focused on getting them onto your site and then converting them into sales, and keeping them as loyal customers

What not to focus on

You.  Many sites have irrelevant content.  We have all seen the juvenile sites where there is a comment along the lines of “I am 18 and just left college and now I am a professional freelance wedding photographer, and I like heavy metal and cars”  Well lots of grown up sites subtly fall into the same trap

Yes, talk about you – but only to add value to your business, or to increase customer confidence.  Do this with care.  Often site owners are “too close to he copy” meaning they view the texts on their sites with blinkers, and can’t see the problems.  At the point of signing off the copy – get a third party to check

Getting started

You have a well thought out plan.  At some point you are going to need to choose a designer or developer, and collide your ideas with theirs.  This is a key make or break stage in the success of your site

The customer-developer-customer-developer-customer cycle of idea creation is a powerful one and can add lots of value to your project. However you need to keep your eye on the ball, and ensure that 100% of the focus of your original plan remains

The point of the information / ideas exchange in the initial process with the developer is to find out if the developer has ideas that add value to your project.  Often we see things in a way that the client had never imagined was possible. The flip side of this is that some designers and developers will attempt to massage over the “trickier bits” of your build

During this information exchange, you will have a pretty good feeling as to he working relationship you will have with your designer / developer

What will the website designer / developer need?

At this stage, we are talking about content.  Well organised content.  Content focused on the needs of your customers as outlined in your plan.  Make sure you keep your content “on topic”

You may be employing a copywriter, if so, they will need your plan, and the idea of the scale of your site

Organisation is the key here.  Well organised sites have consistent navigation, and content falls into clearly defined sections.  Your content ought to fall on the equivalent of the family tree in structure – the front page at the top of the tree, and the sections and content below.   This structure will directly reflect navigation within the site.  If any content item is more than 3 or four clicks away from the front page, you need to re-organise the structure.  We do this in our office with a white board and “Post It” notes.  When you are done – if your model looks like a plate of spaghetti, you haven’t organised your content properly

When writing the content, begin with what your site is primarily focused on.  Your site will fall into clear sections, write articles for the core sections and areas of focus first, and then plan sub sections afterwards.  You may need FAQ’s and glossary or other supporting articles.  Write these next.  Your articles ought to be forming a tree – spreading away from the main front page.  The last documents to sort out relate to your business the “about us” page, shipping policies etc…

Your website will now have a consistent organised and structured content.  You will have begun the process of figuring out the navigation.  You now need to pick out the “very important things” that appear on each page of your website  On most (not all) sites, this is what lands in the header, and footer of the page

Dealing with images

Either you or your developer will need to provide images and photography.  We are pretty unique hear at Place of design, in that we actually can shoot it specifically for a website

What ever route you go down you need to consider several things: Relevancy, design, and licensing.  In the planning stage, you ought o be specifying your imagery, and possibly sourcing example images or the real images.  Do not underestimate the effort needed to get the correct photographs and images – we sometimes spend days and weeks on this part of the build

If your site needs it, consider visual consistency between the images.  Are they all landscape, portrait?  Will they need to be colour or black and white?  Do they all need to be full frame cropped, or distant? Are they high key (with a white background) or with mixed backgrounds?

One or two key shots commissioned for your site, taken by a professional can absolutely make the difference between a good site and an excellent one.  You may spend £2000 on a site, and then £500 for one image, shot specifically for your front page, that increases your sites appeal so much that conversion doubles or more

Shaking it all up and making some sense of it

Your website is about marketing your business and products, or promoting your organisation, or just conveying information.  You now need to look at your key marketing messages, and re-look at all of your content, optimising and tweaking it to your customers needs and marketing message.  You need to look at all of the articles as a group, and iron out inconsistencies

This is a really important stage, as getting this right will ensure visitors get a clear consistent message from page to page as they navigate through your site

You may have heard about search engine optimisation – well this is the stage where you play your part.  You will need advice from your designer or SEO consultant, but essentially, you need to ensure the right keywords and phrases are woven into your copy at this stage.  Your SEO expert will still need to make fine adjustments to the site down the line – really at this stage we are providing a sensible broad framework for the content based search engine optimisation

To be absolutely fair, well organised, structured and written content, is 95% of the way to being optimised in the first place.  We do not recommend writing content for search engines for search engines sake, we recommend writing real, relevant customer focused content, and sensibly tweaking it to perform well on a search engine

The website design

You have the pictures, the content, and it is all structured and ready to go – What happens next?

The designer will design and create the template or visual framework for the site. They will make sure that the structure you laid out, fits the menus, the information common to all pages fits

The website designer may be using a content management system (CMS) or just flat webpage’s – whichever method of delivering the pages, the templating stage is the same

At this point the typography of the site is generally chosen.  This determines the choices and usage of fonts, and will affect readability

Adding any interactive bits and pieces

At this point things like stores, blogs, forums, galleries, and other bespoke interactive bits are added, and styled to the main site.  It is worth noting that many of these products are “off the shelf” but still require localisation, and text adjustments to match the rest of your site.  They will also need careful styling to ensure they sympathetically blend in with the rest of your site

Editing content, after the site has been templated

The best made plans may not take into account the visual effect the template had on the content.  At this stage, we go back and look at all the content, and edit where required.  The content consists of text, headlines, tables, figures, images etc.

If there is a global issue, we may adjust all of the fonts globally, if there are individual problems with the way lines break, or with specific images, we tackle them as we find them

Pretty much the site is done now

Wrong.  Now the site needs to be tested – on different browsers, operating systems.  Your site also needs to be tested at different broadband speeds, by different users.  This process is vitally important

If the site has interactive features, they need to be comprehensively tested too

It is also worth taking a sample of people from your target demographic and using them to assist the testing process of your site too.  What is obvious to a 19 year old may not be obvious to a senior user.  What makes sense in the way you phrased something to a senior, may be totally misunderstood by a youngster

Marketing and Search engine optimisation

I eluded earlier in the article that SEO was something that will need to be re-visited

At the completion of the site, your SEO consultants may need to begin work optimising for keywords and writing clever code in the structure of the site to ensure your site is ranked well.  Often your website designer/developer does this automatically as the site is developed.

Regardless of the exact process in the beginning, the measurement, marketing and tweaking of your site to ensure you are hitting the spot ought to be an ongoing process

Ongoing maintenance

Things change, sites grow, servers get patched, and security loopholes need resolving.  Agreeing an ongoing maintenance contract with your website developer/designer is vital to ensure your site remains healthy and up to date

There is one big question to deal with first – do you need a static site, or a dynamic one?

Static sites
Static sites are like books or brochures, they are fixed, and you can not update them easily once they are online. To subsequently update your website will  require you to call us back.  We will make the changes for you, and this will usually incur a small charge.   In our price list we call these sorts of sites static sites

Dynamic sites
Dynamic sites have a page which you can log into. There will be a system where you can add / edit or change content yourself.  Long term, this means you are in control of ammending the content on your site yourself, without the need to contact us

Dynamic sites come in many different variants – blogs, content management sites, e-commerce sites etc.

Making the choice

If you want a website that needs to present the same information today, as it will need to present in a few years time, a static site is probably for you. If you feel that you will need to regularly change and amend your content, then a dynamic site is probably the best choice for your business

I want to know more

We have created an article which explains the differences between static / blog / CMS sites in some detail – click here to read it

Get some free honest advice

Part of the process of our free initial consultation is to establish the type of site your business needs. We will outline clearly what we feel is best for your business, and explain why we come to our conclusions. Call us today on 0115 845 8953, for a friendly no-obligation discussion about your website needs

Static sites
Firstly we can produce a static site or “brochure site”. A static site has pages that are fixed and unchanging.  If you want to change something, you need to contact the designer who will alter the site for you.  Static sites are very suitable for companies that have information that never changes very much.  Where price updates are done every few years, or for presenting long term factual information

Static sites are not dynamic, they dont really interact with the user, thry presrnt information, and that is it.  There is nothing wrong with a static site, infact static sites are a very good platform for a small business, and even on larger sites, can work very well.  An example of a static site we have produced is www.journeyafrica.co.uk

The Journey Africa website is a good example of a larger static site, and even though the site owners can not update pages themselves>  Just because we cal the site a static site, doesnt mean the content is not intersting or dynamic.  The individual pages themselves can have dynamic content – look at one of the hotel pages for example: http://www.journeyafrica.co.uk/one-and-only-hotel-cape-town.html.  On this page there is a slider containing nested content, a slideshow of images that is user reactive, a form feeding back page specific info to the site owner etc.  On the rest of the site you will find liknks to on the fly currency conversion, video streaming, and other DHTML slideshows and image scrollers

Blog style sites
This site is a blog style site.  The framework is provided by generic blog software, and the design and template was done in house.  The advantage of this style of site for a small to medium sized business is that information can be added, subtracted, amended very quickly.  We chose this format to cope with the way we present portfolios.  Essentially each portfolio is a new page, which we can add when ever we want

You will notice a few differences between this site and your average blog.  We don’t have calendars.  Articles are not dated and don’t display an author name.  There is no facility to add comments.  In essence, all the standard blog features have been programatically removed, leaving behind the same features that you find on a static site, that is – menu’s, and pages of information

We provide a lot of these blog based sites for small businesses, especially businesses who want to invest the time in continuously adding content to their websites

Blog style sites are quite limited in the way they present information, and don’t do some things very well.  This is why for example on the www.caronphotography.co.uk website; we integrated a blog into a static site and added a separate gallery system.  The customer uses the blog in the traditional sense, the rest of the site deals with the customers other requirements

If you want to keep amending your sites information, and the information you want to present is very simple, a blog style site has a lot of advantages for you

Content management systems (CMS)
Content management systems suit companies and organisations which have a lot of content to present and organise.  You can add, remove, and even time content.  You can have multiple authors, and a person who supervises or moderates the addition of content

A content management framework can deal with other activities, like e-commerce, galleries, forums, blogs, polls, questionnaires etc.  We used a content management system on the www.lencarta.com site.  The site in this instance streams video’s, offers downloads, and sells products.  The staff at Lencarta keep the content fresh and up to date themselves

The major advantage over a blog style site is scalability and extensibility.  A CMS system can scale up from a few pages to being absolutely enormous, with thousands of pages, managing thousands of users, and offering a plethora of functionalities that can be easily added and removed as required

One advantage of a CMS is the separation of structure, content, and design.  In other words, you can re-design the site in a year or two, and the structure and content remain the same.  You can easily re-structure existing content, or just amend existing content.  The power of adjusting the template, while everything else remains constant can not be underestimated.  Example – Christmas sales – you can re-brand your whole site, for Christmas, or the summer holidays, just by switching templates

CMS sites are not exclusively for larger businesses, they are for business and organisations that want that extra organisational layer, or require the additional features that the basic blog system does not offer

Conclusion
If you want a site that presents fairly unchanging information, and you have no desire to update content yourself – a static site is probrably your best bet.  If you have content that needs to be added to on a week by week basis, and you are happy to add the content yourself, using a simple editor, then a blog based site is possibly the best option for you.  If you have a organisation that is spread out, with lots of content, or you need a site to expand with yoru business as it grows,  or you are looking for a fluid reactive site that is scalable, then a content managment (CMS) type of website will be your best option

About the Author

Richard King has been producing websites for over 15 years, and will be delighted to discuss your business needs with you.  We do not have a one size fits all approach.  For a no-obligation, free consultation and chat, just call Richard on 0115 845 8953  The least he can do is make sure you are on the right track

Comparison to real bricks and mortar stores
There are a lot of comparisons between high street retailing and e-commerce. But some things are not given. Something’s that seem totally logical in a real shop seem numbingly illogical in an e-commerce store. For this reason, discussing your needs with a designer at the preliminary stages is a very good idea, helping you find your boundaries a lot faster

A really good example of this is stock control. In a real store, stock control is easy, you sell things one by one through a till, and the stock level decreases. If you bundle products together, things are taken “out of stock” bundled and put into stock. With online, retailers just assume the online store packages will bundle and organise stock for them, this is sometimes isn’t the case

Before specifying an e-commerce site, you need to consider

• How / who / where you physically deliver stock – what processes do you need to make your “real” backend systems work
• How are you getting / who is organising / what is you POS material (photography / write-ups)
• What pricing structure(s) you want
• How products are related to each other. Example king sized bed base + king sized mattress makes sense, whereas king sized bed base + single mattress makes no sense at all. Or buy product A, and product B… and you need to buy product C to hold them together etc…

All of these processes above are done on autopilot in a retail environment, in a e-commerce store they need to be fleshed out with rules, detailed ones!

Specification for an online store

Please note that I’m not telling you what to do I am really challenging you to think a bit in the right areas, I am outlining the areas that will need a lot of attention

Marketing
Internet marketing is about
• Understanding & designing for demographics
• Getting right visitors on the site
• Converting visitors into paying visitors
• Encouraging them to come again and tell their friends

The specification for the website ought to include everything, form a code and design view that will facilitate the above… Data collection, method to email customers from the database, on page search engine optimisation, Microsites (if needed) for specific demographics / products etc…

If the designer gets his bit right, the subsequent marketing efforts will be cheaper. You must appreciate that Internet marketing and conversion is an ongoing task, and requires a lot of patience and effort once the site is live. A good designer will give you the framework to make the subsequent efforts easier

Taking money
You will need a robust and secure method of payments that suits your business model – different providers have different rates of fees at different price points. Example if your Average order value is £1.00, you would be unwise to pay £0.50 per transaction. Conversely if your average order value is £500, you would be daft to pay a percentage, especially if £0.50 per transaction is available. Different shopping cart systems will and won’t integrate with different payment gateways. You need to know who you will be wanting to use (and have a backup provider) before you specify the store

Displaying the product
If you sell ring tones, your needs for displaying the product are completely different to selling spanners. The specification for displaying each product needs to be detailed

For example:
• I need this media (audio, video, pictures)
• I need x amount of additional images
• I need datasheet
• I need a category, and quick product description, and a long product description, with a video feed etc..

Think very hard about how you want the product to be displayed – structurally, in an organisational sense and visually. Do you need a product search?

Speak to a designer before nailing this part of a specification down – there are other (search engine optimisation / conversion) reasons why a certain route may be more suitable

Legal stuff
You need to cover your bases in different ways depending on your product – you need to consider the distance selling regulations the data protection act etc. This means you need certain texts freely accessible on your site

Accessibility
How friendly do you want the site to be? Do you want to offer “print me” pages with plain styling, do you want a large text version etc.

Servers
Moving a store that is (for example) hitting a bandwidth issue on a server, to a bigger server, is a royal pain, causing down time – you will need:

• A secure server that is patched and well maintained
• A server with the technologies you require to ensure functionality
• A server that is scalable, especially if video or a high rate of traffic is anticipated

If you haven’t chosen a server, you need to discuss this with the designer. Some e-commerce platforms require certain server setups etc..

Stock
Describe how the site deals with bundles (if you are selling bundles) and what happens when an item goes out (and back into stock)

Usability (for you)
Some e-commerce platforms are a pleasure in the backend, others are a nightmare

Support
What support does your provider give you, is there a manual, is there an online community. Are there prompt security patches

Backup
How do you easily back the whole store up?

Shipping
Define exactly how you ship, what rates, and where you ship too

Example questions:
• Do you ship for the same price to the Outer Hebrides as mainland UK
• Are you offering tracking?
• Are you offering shipping to France?
• Does the price change for next day?
• What if the product is in 2 boxes?
• Do you ship by weight and dimensions?

Be very sure about what you want before you get started. Again different packages have different ideas and systems on shipping

The future
Are you going to expand? If so – what is the plan? Some systems are very scalable, others not so

Integrations
How your store interacts with the rest of your business is important

• Do you need integrations to accounts packages – which ones?
• Do you need integration to a warehouse – if so, what is the specification?
• Do you need a Froogal feed? (Ask us if you don’t know what this is)

There are probably 100’s of other minor things to consider, but this lot should be food for thought

About the Author

Richard King has had many years of experience in real retail management, and many years experience in providing e-commerce for online retailers

Call Richard today to discuss your needs, and find out how easy getting your business idea online can be

0115 845 8953