1. Website Fundamentals Planning Your Website

2. Planning your Website Setting a goal for your site

3. Setting a Goal for your Site Most websites fail.

4. Setting a Goal for your Site Most websites fail. For every Google or Amazon there are thousands of sites that don’t make it, so what can you do to make your website successful?

5. Setting a Goal for your Site The first thing you need to do to avoid failure is to define exactly what you mean by success.

6. Setting a Goal for your Site What do you want your website to achieve?

7. Setting a Goal for your Site Before you do anything you should decide on a short, clear goal for your site and then write it down.

8. Setting a Goal for your Site Possible goals include: To make enough money selling your line of hand-made jewellery to give up your day job To tell everyone how great your pet hamster is To sell your range of skateboards To get more parents to send their children to your school To fill more rooms in your hotel during the off season To educate divers about the dangers they pose to coral reefs To raise money for cancer research To help people understand trigonometry

9. Setting a Goal for your Site It’s important that you only set one goal for your site. If you try to do too many things at once, you’ll fail.

10. Planning your Website Understanding your visitors

11. Understanding your Visitors A website without visitors is as pointless as a pencil without lead. To make sure the people who visit your site don’t leave straight away you’ll need to identify your target audience, the people you want to visitor your site, so you can ensure the design and content will appeal to them.

12. Understanding your Visitors You need to know as much about your target audience as possible. Ask yourself lots of questions about them: How old are they? What kind of jobs do they have? Where do they live? What computer do they own? How much do they use the Web? What other sites do they visit? Why have they come to your site?

13. Understanding your Visitors Once you’ve got a clear idea of who your target audience is, you’ll need to think about how you are going to use this knowledge to achieve the goal you’ve set for your site.

14. Planning your Website Designing your site

15. Designing your Site Although you can just jump in and start writing Web pages right away, it’s a good idea to first think about the design of your site. That way, you’ll give yourself direction and you’ll need to reorganise less alter.

16. Designing your Site To design your site: Figure out why you’re creating this site. Think about your audience. How can you tailor your content to appeal to this audience? For example, should you add lots of graphics or is it more important that your page download quickly? How many pages will you need? What sort of structure would you like it to have? Do you want visitors to go through your site in a particular direction, or do you want to make it easy for them to explore in any direction? Sketch out your site on paper Devise a simple, consistent naming system for your pages, images, and other external files

17. Planning your Website Creating a site map

18. Creating a Site Map A sitemap is a visual plan of your website showing the pages and how they link to each other. In other words a map of your site. If your site is small you’ll have a simple sitemap, but the larger it becomes, the more important it is to have a logical, well thought out sitemap so your visitors don’t get lost of confused.

19. Planning your Website Organising files

20. Organising Files Before you have too many files, it’s a good idea to figure out where you’re going to put them.

21. Organising Files To organise your files: Create a central folder or directory to hold all the material that will be available at your Web site Divide the folder in a way that reflects the organisation of your Web site You may decide to create a separate folder for each section of your site, along with individual subfolders for images and other external files You can create a top-level images folder for images that are common to all areas of your Web site