IQue - Our Twist on the Web

Once your point person is in place, initial planning for a website begins with inventorying and mapping out the content that will go into its population. Organize your content into 4 primary sections.

It’s always a good starting point to gather and evaluate all of your companies current marketing material. This gives you many areas to build upon and will usually let you know who was responsible for what. You will also be forced to revisit topics such as vision statements, demographic studies, focus group tests (for products) and any other areas of marketing that may need updating.

Once you’ve taken inventory and established your sites initial focus, you need to think about what your main sections are going to be and branch out from there. Your main sections are your main topics to write about. Even if you start with a paragraph per section, that’s better than nothing and a great foundation to build on. It will undoubtedly spark other ideas and needs. Also, having a grasp on content per section/page, will help make decisions on development technologies needed along with specific pieces of functionality to present it.

Now, let’s start to put our initial flow chart together. Notice I said initial, as it will evolve and always be considered a work  in progress. You can use programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, Excel, Word, Visio or OminGraffle to set your charts up. I usually like to sketch things down on graph paper first and then fill in the details with Photoshop or Illustrator. But, that’s just me.

Always, always, always start with your Home page! After all, this is usually where your domain is initially going to go. Think of it as your reception area that is going to be guiding potential customers wherever they need to be. This must be aesthetically pleasing, easy to evaluate, strategic and straight to the point.

As you’re creating your flow chart, compile lists of topics for each page. These will usually help determine your overall  navigation structure and play an integral role in developing your sites usability. This is also when you would start to tentatively assign individual or group tasks as well. It’s important to know who is going to be responsible in helping you gather the sites’ information and whether or not you need to hire more staff.

At this point, you just need to continue with the process until you have the initial phase of your content map (flow chart) layed out, tons of topic ideas/content blocks written and most of your navigation planned out. And, be sure to always keep your sites’ focus in mind. Meaning, don’t do sections/pages just to do them. Keep things simple and try to get a potential customer to your end result goal as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Keep going through this process over and over again until you feel like an effective content map, with documentation, has been written and ready to be evaluated by a web developer(s).