How to plan a website

Start with the visitor, not the business

Write down who actually arrives. Not a demographic, a person with a situation: somebody whose boiler failed this morning, somebody comparing three providers, somebody who was recommended you and is checking you are real.

Each of those needs something different, and a homepage written for all three at once serves none of them. The plan exists to give each one a route rather than a compromise.

Then write what you want each to do next. Call, book, read something, fill in a form. A page with no next step is a dead end, whether the visitor arrived from a search engine or an answer engine, and a site full of them converts nothing.

List the questions before the pages

Every page worth having exists because somebody asks something. So the plan starts as a list of questions rather than a list of pages, and the questions come from your inbox and your phone rather than from a template.

Collect them for a week if you can. What people ask before booking, what they ask while deciding, what they get wrong, and what they are surprised by afterward. That list is the honest basis for a site.

Then group anything that is the same question phrased differently. Our page on competing pages covers why several pages answering one question is worse than one answering it properly.

Turn questions into a page list

One page per question, with the question written beside it so the purpose is never in doubt. If you cannot write a question next to a proposed page, the page probably should not exist.

Mark which pages are commercial and which are educational. Both matter and they do different jobs, and a plan that is all education produces readers rather than customers.

Note what makes each page specific to your business. Our page on thin content covers what happens to pages where the answer to that is nothing at all.

What a finished plan contains

The list below is what we would want written down before anybody opens a builder. It fits on two sides of paper for most small businesses and it is the cheapest hour in the project.

• Every page, with the one question it answers
• A parent section for each, with no page left loose
• What makes each page specific to this business
• The pages you deliberately excluded, and why
• Which pages are commercial and which are educational
• Where each page links to and what links to it
• An honest build order, money pages first

Decide what you will not build

This is the part most plans skip and it is what keeps a site from sprawling. A blog because everybody has one, a team page with one person, a page for a service you stopped offering.

Write the exclusions down with the reason. Otherwise the same ideas return every six months and somebody rebuilds the argument from nothing.

Fewer pages done properly beats more pages done thinly, and the discipline to say no is what separates a plan from a wish list.

Order the build honestly

The pages that bring in work first, then the hub pages that hold them together, then the educational material. That order keeps the site useful at every stage rather than only when it is finished.

Do not build everything on the plan at once. Ten good pages linked properly outperform fifty thin ones, and the plan is a direction rather than a commitment for this quarter.

Our page on site structure covers how the sections fit together, which is worth settling before the third page rather than during the thirtieth.

Keep the plan alive

Treat it as a document that gets updated rather than one produced once. Every new page is added to it deliberately, which is what stops a site decaying into whatever seemed worth adding that month.

Revisit it when customer questions change, which happens after any change to your services or your market. The plan was built from what people ask, and what people ask moves.

It is also the answer when somebody asks what the site is for. A page list with a purpose beside each entry is a better answer than anything a homepage can say.