There are methods for planning websites… and then there are methods for planning websites. Whatever the audience or goal, content organisation and curation are key to creating a successful website that people will engage with and love.

We’ll explain why you should be using a content-first approach and a website planning tool. Learn our preferred methodology for planning any website project so that it comes out perfect, professional, and on time.

Phase 1: Pre-Planning

1. Identify Goals

Before you lift a real or digital pencil, you, your team, or your client needs to decide what the goals of the website are. Are they to gain readership, sell products, engage users, or educate students? Define what success will look like for the website and determine your performance indicators. Once this is clearly defined, continually ask yourself if it moves you closer to or farther from your goals.

2. Define the Audience

Another powerful benefit to using an interactive visual sitemap creator is that handling complex or very large sitemaps can be made simple. Use the section feature to break out the sitemap into sub-sitemaps easily. Expand and collapse sections of your sitemap so you focus on specific areas where you are currently working or sharing.  Making edits to multiple sections or page groups of a large sitemap is easy using the batch editor. Assign page types, labels, colours and more.

3. Determine the Purpose

It’s important to understand what you want visitors to do on your website. Do you want them to read through as many pages as possible, or maybe find a product and buy it with as little distraction as possible? By outlining the purpose, you can create content, structures and user flow that is more favourable to achieving your goals.

4. Plan Information Architecture Elements

Before you start creating content, it’s helpful to identify data types, information hierarchies, and content taxonomies. This is the final piece to understanding the content that you will need to create for the website. Planning information architecture helps promote content consistency, familiarity among pages and sections, and unifies the text and media presented on the site.

Phase 2: Craft Architecture, Content and User Experience

5. Map Website Architecture

Decide which pages you will need, how they will be structured and in what hierarchy. You can also start planning your website with menus and navigation systems. We recommend using website sitemaps to better visually understand and explain where content will live within the folder structure of your website. Site mapping also allows you to test a variety of scenarios for content placement before you ever start coding.

6. Plan Content

When using the content-first approach, it’s now time to start creating actual content for your website. This may include text, video, audio or other media. For sites with a finite set of content (such as a Saas front end), you may want to complete the content in its entirety. However, with situations like blogs, you may want to create a few pieces of content and create a general template or set of templates for future content creation.

7. Diagram User Flow

Diagramming user flow through a site that supports your content, purpose, and audience will help to improve the user experience. Creating diagrams allows you to plot the actual paths visitors take through the site, from page to page. You may uncover unexpected dead ends, excessive clicking, or other navigational issues. Your diagram may include separate paths for different types of audience members.

Phase 3: Design Layouts, Graphics, Infrastructure

8. Design Prototypes

It’s time to start putting together wireframes, style guides, typography and other elements. Don’t forget to share designs with team members regularly. Keeping stakeholders involved as much as possible ensures a feeling of inclusivity and smooths out the approval process.

9. Plan Infrastructure

You may or may not be involved in this step, as it sometimes falls on the IT managers. However, it is important to understand the technology you will be building for. This may include CMS platforms, frameworks, languages, system requirements, data storage, and media handling. Infrastructure can significantly impact how your content is delivered or how your website is structured and designed.

10. Design Graphics

At this point, you should have the green light to start creating actual design mockups of what the site will look like, including how the content will be displayed. Because you took the time to follow steps 1-9, the actual design process should be pretty smooth, as you are locked into supporting your content, audiences, and goals. Share often with stakeholders throughout the process.