I have described on other blogs how to brief a website but it's crucial before you do that you fully understand what your business needs.
We know that the home page is a crucial element any any website as it's usually the first point of entry for users of the site. Before you go planning what will go on the home page you MUST sit down and fully understand the whole of the website and how the home page fits in. This will especially be important in terms of marketing, as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and email campaigns may be employed in the promotion of your website.
Most people have a fair idea of the content they want, but invariably fail to produce a site plan and don't fully realise how the whole sits together and, therefore, miss great opportunities to make their website truly an invaluable tool.
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
This may be an old adage but it's true. You have to sit down and plan your website before you can decide what goes on your home page let alone anywhere else. So if you haven't done the planning DO IT before you do anything else.
Obviously, the size of the business makes a difference in terms of the services or products that are or will be on offer to the web user on entry to the final site.
So create a site map. The 'Basic' building block for any site build is the understanding of the content that will make up the website. This comes before even thinking of any other functionality the website will need.
So sit down and begin to plan the basic content of your site. You can use programs to help you do this or you can be as simple as setting out post-it notes. There are plenty of tools out there to help you with the planning but you need to aim to have an understandable diagrammatic description of your site.
Where to put the information
What isn't so easy is making sure you put the right information in the right area of your site. I always find it best to give priority to information first. This will help you in terms of structure. Use a scale such as a 1 - 10 scale or alphabetic scale, but use a system that works best for you.
Now we need to think about how the web will hold the information. I'm not talking technical know-how just some basic common-sense. Think first of having information of a particular type and placing them in a container (say a Tupperware box) we may label that box as 'Services' for example. All the information we want in the 'Services' box we place inside the Tupperware box so we know anything to do with that type of information can be found easily. We can call the 'Services' box a 'Category' container and we may have several such boxes for example 'Products', 'FAQs' etc. Each of these boxes may need some further segmentation to help define the information we are offering. So let's say that the 'Services' category box needs another box inside it called 'Consultancy', and we place any information that is relevant to consultancy in that box. Now we have just created an 'Sub-Category' which is a 'Child' of the 'Services' category.
I hope you are still keeping up with me, so now we are beginning to segment the information required for your website into neatly defined areas. We can now call all the information contained within 'Consultancy' as 'Children' of that sub-category. As you will begin to see, we are defining the structure much like a family-tree. There is no particular limit to how you nest information on a website, however, you must ALWAYS bear in mind that people coming to your website want to find information quickly and easily. So don't get too bogged down in segmenting your website because people will not be able to find the relevant information that they require and likely as not will leave and go elsewhere.
I use the analogy of the tupperware boxes to illustrate that if you have too many nested boxes you'll get tired of opening one after another to get to what you want. This is the same on the web, remember peoples attention span is less than a 'Goldfish' these days. So make the information quick to access!
Once you've got the hang of the way in which we begin to define areas of your website you will see the pattern emerging of how we can navigate that information too. This will also help you to think objectively about the information you want as opposed to really need. For instance, even though you have neatly categorised a piece of information down to a third or forth level down the family tree, you may realise that this piece of information needs to be accessed far more easily. This will allow you to begin refactoring the way you have segmented the information so far.
In essence, we have begun to create a site map or flow chart of the information, where it sits in terms of structure, and a rudimentary navigation.
Put all of the plan you have amassed so far into a chart. Do what feels comfortable but bear in mind your web developer or designer needs to be able to understand what you are trying to achieve.
Once you have done your first-draft of your chart we need to think more objectively. Print it out or lay it out so that you can sit back and think clearly about what you need. Firstly, as you will have seen on countless sites there is a level of information that is vital yet not the main purpose on any website. These are 'Terms and Conditions', 'Privacy', 'Shipping Information' etc. Although these could quite easily be categorised within the structure of information you have gathered, they need to be immediately visible to your users. These types of information generally will be offered on a secondary navigation but not within the main navigation. They may also be mentioned and linked to for other areas of your website but must always be apparent.
You now have an understanding of the information you need to present on your website. What I suggest is now you need to analyse where you have or need to have access to duplication of information. This is important as your web developer would need to understand that you need the ability to assign a single piece of information to multiple areas. This is a build issue. You will also need to be able to update one single piece of information rather than multiple versions of the same thing.
Administration of your information is a key consideration for any website and, understanding from the outset where sensible time-saving measures could or should be made is essential to all parties involved in the creation of your website.
Understanding that you will need to cross-reference information in multiple areas of your website is crucial to understanding the best methods of doing that.
So now you have created your basic site map you need to be smart and not assume it's right. This is the opportune point to get other key people involved, to get some informed opinion, to get some objective but constructive input. This should help clarify grey areas in your site, it will most-certainly highlight those areas you have forgotten, but within a business environment it will also show you where others have a differing view of priority.
Remember, each area of your business is represented by your web site, either directly or indirectly, you must ensure that you don't mis-represent those areas. It's common-sense that not areas can be on the home page of your website. But mechanisms can be used to help ensure a balance of presentation that helps ease the question of information priority.
For me one of the big benefits of having a thorough site map, is that all parties can see the end goal and therefore, can plan accordingly in terms of scheduling and effecting delivery points throughout the lifecycle of the project. Once you have gone through this planning process you will be in a far stronger position when speaking with developers or designers. You will understand what needs to be delivered more clearly so the interchange of both visual and functional design can be fit-for-purpose.
Think about the impact on your business...
Whilst it may sound obvious that other people in your organisation will have a different point-of-view regarding priority of information, if it's not clearly dealt with at this important stage it could cause HR issues further down the track when employees can become disgruntled if they feel that they have been overlooked. It's a potential disconnect that I've seen before, a marketing manager or director goes and gets a website created without interacting properly with key staff to ensure that the information is both fit-for-purpose and that it has been presented in a way that fits with both company policy and structure too.
Your website is not only just for the purposes of delivering information to an end-user but is increasingly an invaluable tool in collecting information. There are very few businesses that would not benefit from a site that can give you the tools to aid both business process and marketing. Your website should be viewed as part of a digital eco-system that interacts and impacts on each element. But all are there as much for the benefit of your company than it is as source of free information. Gone are the days when a website was simply an online brochure. It should be a fully interactive experience.
What I mean here is that if we take a simple idea that you have an existing system to hold customer CRM info. What you don't want to be doing is duplicating entries. So we need to make the website work to your advantage by automating and web-gathered data so that it imports to your CRM system with the minimum of fuss. This is where the information you require may be very specific but will impact directly on the build of the website. It may mean a little more investment up front but could save many hours of data entry down the line. And again here, using joined up thinking, how can we use your CRM system to be more effective with web promotion, online sales or predictive marketing.
The point is that once you have a site map it can help aid you in the process of joining the dots in your business far more effectively, especially if you think outside the narrow box of just a website. Think about the needs of the business, don't just think we need a web page to say this or that, think what can we get out of this web presence. Whilst the website has a job of marketing it can be used to greater effect in bringing areas of your business together. There are systems that can join all the dots, in terms of process, because they use the web as an element of the whole process rather than as just a necessary evil that the business has to do.
I've touched on other areas in this blog on purpose. Not only to highlight why planning is important but more so that you should not take your website as an activity in isolation. It is part of a symbiotic whole.
