Website planning & design

This is a guide to starting out on the path to creating your first real website - it is not really intended for those people whom are content accepting a handful of template based pages spewed forth from a not-quite-dead-yet portal site - this is intended to be a series of pointers for people who have an idea that they want a website that contains a large number of separate pages, but have not attempted something like this before.

You may be wondering why I think I'm qualified to explain this? Well over the last few years I've built a number of websites, ranging from simple machine created single-page sites, through to behemoths that are as complex as commercial sites. Additionally I am very adept at reverse engineering logic, code and anything related to those areas - I have taken apart and rebuilt sites leaving a much improved end product. Apparently modification of pretty much any language is something I excel at - show me a working example of code and I can make it do something new within the day.

With each of my sites I have honed my abilities a little further, learning which choices were mistakes, and which were valuable decisions. The site that originally wrapped around this is mine, it was coded by hand and optimised by hand - from this you can see the quality of my work at that I'm not just some frontpage using upstart.

Keeping notes

Since you are creating something which will contain a fair number of pages and therefore a large variety of content, it makes sense to write down all your ideas on paper so that you can re-assemble them easily later on rather than try to recall complex concepts from memory. There is nothing worse than forgetting your best ideas.

The document itself doesn't need to be fancy or technical it simply needs to have the title of the page (just a vague title and it doesn't have to represent a physical path) also with a description of what exactly the point of that page is.

Researching your ideas

Since you now understand roughly what you want in the site it is time to create a list of the areas you want to cover but know very little about. Frequent items that spring to mind are forums which you want to be part of the site (rather than hosted elsewhere) and various scripts which provide certain functions such as tracking, or banner rotation etc.

For the majority of cases you can simply use something like google to track down what you want, but in somecases you may have to look to corporate websites or even user-support groups for your answers - if the answers you find are not simple then you may have to resort to bookmarking or making notes.

If the worst comes to the worst - you find no details but you do find a site running an example of what you want, then don't panic - simply download the pages in question to your machine and see how they did it - hey you may even find the name of the people who developed this in the first place!

Additionally when you hare done researching a task, if you assign it a score based on how complex you think it will be to get it working, this gives you an idea what you may have to remove if you cannot implement it correctly with your site.

Researching website hosting

Now you know what you want to be able achieve and approximately what is involved, so this would be a good time to look for a webhost that supports the necessary features. You may already have a host but it's a good idea to check they support what you are planning, otherwise you could simply be wasting your time. Free hosts have limits built into their accounts due to the fact that webhosts would like to be able to sell you something at the end of the day!

If a feature isn't listed, now is an excellent time to ask if that was just an omission or whether it was deliberately left out of the package. This shows you two things - exactly what you will be getting, but also it shows the level of support that they are willing to give to their free customers.

Usually you find that webhosts don't distinguish between paying and free customers so you have a chance to see what any other support issues with them will be answered like. Will they respond at all? Will they give an honest answer? Will they try to fob you off with poor excuses?

A final item to check is the terms and conditions when you sign up. In theory are legally binding for the period of the contract between you and your webhost. If you plan to put excessive downloads, or questionable files in as part of your site you will want to read the terms and conditions if for no other reason than to understand what you can and cannot do.

Identify Sections

Now that you understand what your idea of what the website will contain, and what it can technically contain, you are ready to draw up a paper list of general areas that pages can be grouped into. In addition to helping you understand which pages will need to go where it also helps you establish exactly how all the pages relate to each other as they sit within the site.

The purpose of the exercise is to give you a list you can tick off completed items from during the build phase, essentially it is a large "to do" list for your new website development. This avoids leaving areas unwritten, and more importantly should avoid leaving them unfinished.

Identify Linkages

Again this is a paper exercise, it requires you to list out how each section will link together within itself, but also how and where each section will link to other sections.

When complete this gives you an idea of how you will want people to navigate between the pages on your site - as part of the next stage it is very critical to be able to say "I will be putting X links here, another set here, and a handful scattered through the text" if only to remind you what reality requires of your site.

Also this gives you a chance to work out how how visitors might be flowing through your site, and allows you to think if there is anything you might need to do to help them out if they get stuck.

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