Three Steps To Planning A Website

Websites are built for a variety of reasons. Personally, I build websites to make money. Other reasons to build a website include promoting a non-profit organization, your school, your church, your passion, or just your family and yourself. Just like all things, websites work better when they are planned out. Here are three steps you need to do to plan any website.

The three steps are:

1. Decide why you're building the website.
2. Figure out how you're going to get people to visit it.
3. Decide what you want those visitors to do.

Let's look at each of these in turn.

Why You're Building the Website?

What do you want your website to accomplish? If you're building your website for your church, for instance, what do you want it to do? You might want a page that's a calendar of upcoming events. Maybe a page with directions and times. How about a page introducing the minister and assistant ministers?

A lot of families build websites and send out the URL instead of Christmas cards. What do you want to accomplish here? Maybe just save yourself the trouble of writing Christmas cards. Maybe you're trying to draw your family together.

As far as money, there are several ways to make money through a website. If you've got the right topic, you can just slap on AdSense and watch the money roll in. You can do Kontera text links and get paid every time one of your visitors clicks through on one of those links. You can promote affiliate products, or even make your own product to sell. Really, the sky's the limit!

How Are You Going to Get Traffic?

If you're building a website for your family, then an email or a phone call will suffice to let everyone know how to find it. If it's for something like your school or your church, you need to figure out who you want to see the site. Is it just for current students or members? Or, do you want to use it to recruit new people?

If you're interested in recruiting new people, you need to do the same type of things we do for ecommerce sites. You'll need to market your site somehow-pay per click advertising, social bookmarking, search engine optimization, are a few of the options.

Of course, if you're building a website for business purposes, you'll need to really advertise it. Pay per click, social bookmarking, search engine optimization, article marketing are only a few of the ways you can promote your website.

What Do You Want Your Visitors To Do?

If the website is for your family, then you might just want them to look at your pictures. Maybe you want them to interact. Then a blog would work best for you, rather than a static website. That way they could leave comments.

If you're using your site to recruit new students for your school, or members for your church, then you need to approach this more like a business approaches it. If my goal is selling people stuff, then what I would probably do here is write an informational ebook and offer it in exchange for the visitor's email address. I would also do social bookmarking, and maybe pay per click-according to my visitor value.

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