Website Checklist: planning

Planning

• know your audience
• site strategy
• scope the features
• maintenance plan
• Turn cost centers into revenue sources
• prototype structure
• conduct usability testing
• advertising on your site

Know you audience
Your site is built for your visitors. If you don't know who they are your project will fail.

Strategy
Your site needs a goal and a method of measuring the success at attaining that goal. Your strategy may be to provide knowledge, generate leads, or make sales. Without knowing your strategy there is no way to measure the success or failure of your project.

Scope features
Each feature you consider for the site must be evaluated against how it contributes to the strategy. If it does not contribute to attaining the goal perhaps the feature should not be included. In most businesses it is important to set a fixed cost and schedule to a project so that it's return on investment can be measured. Understand that you cannot fix time, price and scope. I find that the most successful projects use an agile approach with a fixed time and price, and the scope is allowed to vary in a controlled manner.

Website Maintenance
Sites typically contain a mix of static and dynamic content. Each content area should have a maintenance plan. How often is the content updated or added, who's responsibility is it? Is the content cost effective to maintain?

Cost center or revenue source?
Maintaining content can be expensive or lucrative. Ever content feature should be evaluated to see if it is possible to have someone else generate the content for you for free, or even pay you for it. For example if you are planning to publish articles about toy's. Do you have to write the articles yourself? Maybe it would be better to have your visitors submit stories about their children's favorite toys. Perhaps a local toy store would provide you with articles about new toys in exchange for their brand on the page and a link to their site they might even pay you for it.

Prototype
Many times it is difficult to discuss site options without being able to *see* how it looks and feels. A prototype should provide the basic layout and organization of the site to facilitate planning sessions.

Usability
Starting with the prototype and continuing through the development of the site regular usability tests should be done. This can be as simply as watching your mother use the site or as extensive as hiring a professional company such as User Interface Engineering to design and conduct your testing. Whichever you choose the information will help you achieve the site goals. Follow the "Principal of least surprise".

Advertising
Advertising on your site can be a great way to earn revenue. If you are planning an advertising based site it helps to plan for that from the beginning. Google^TM's adSense^TM program is an excellent way to make revenue from your site.




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