Planning Stages

“A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step” Confucius

“Ah, hello my friend, we meet again – I see you’re looking keen and ready to start. That’s great and I applaud your enthusiasm, but first we must plan our journey. For the road ahead is pitted with dangers and the unprepared will surely suffer ill fate.”

Yes, just like if you were going to set out on an adventure, you will need to plan this too. You could just dive straight in if you really wanted to but believe me, you will save yourself a whole lotta time, effort and heartache – plus you will end up with much more polished product. If you plan it.

So, let’s take a peek at what we are going to cover in this chapter.

Where are we going, what do we want to achieve?
Content – it’s all about you
Making sense of the chaos – joining it all up
Picking the right tools for the right job
What’s your name and where do you live?
Summary and final pointers

The M-Wallet

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To help us all along I am going to base these tutorials on a fictional company of mine the M-Wallet” (A music device like an I-Pod that’s built into a leather wallet), and between us we are going to help JP get his company on the web. Now JP has a few demands and these are as follows;

1) He needs to be able to update the website himself without the need of technical knowledge

2) He needs to be able to sell products through an e-commerce shop

3) He needs the website to conform to W3C web standards

4) He needs the website to be future proofed

JP didn’t actually ask for points 3 & 4 but we’re going to chuck those in anyway because they are important. W3C is the main international standards organisation for the World Wide Web. All we mean by `conforming to W3C Standards’ is that your website will be coded in a way that allows everyone to be able to read it, regardless of the device they are using or if they are disabled. Future Proofed basically means your website allows for expansion and won’t have to be changed if you `grow too big for your boots’.

These are of course layman’s explanations and both points have very far reaching and in depth connotations. Suffice to say, we shan’t be delving those deeper depths, at least not in this guide. We shall however be meeting both points, and without even knowing it or even having to do any extra work – now that’s rather convenient, isn’t it.

Where are we going, what do we want to achieve

The first thing we need to ascertain is where we are going, what it is JP wants to achieve with his website and who his target audience are. I’m not going to get bogged down in business coaching here but I will say this. We need to sell the customer the benefit of the product or service – rather than the product itself. For example, I buy a drill because I need a hole – I don’t buy a drill because I want a drill. Sell me the hole, not the drill.

JP already sells the M-Wallet through a catalogue that gets delivered through the post for free. He has done his market research and found that his main target audience appear to be young men aged between 17 and 25. The purpose of the website is to increase the exposure the M-Wallet gets and to hopefully accelerate his sales from the much wider audience he’ll be reaching. To do this JP plans to build a site that will not only promo the M-Wallet and allow customers to buy it online, but also to build a community through the use of a web forum which will hopefully keep people coming back to the site. If there is a big enough user-base he should then be able to sell advertising space to other merchants.

JP is armed with a selection of marketing material including press releases and some nice product photos. He has an idea in his head of how he wants his site to function but not much else. It’s time to hit the drawing board!

A useful way of feeling out the structure of a site is to use a `mind-map’. Here is a simple example of how JP’s site could look as a mind map.

MindMap for the m-wallet website

Here we can see there is obviously a Home Page. The green dashed lines in this case denote that the home page is made up from various articles and products taken from Press Releases, Special Offers and the Shop. The map shows that we have a News, Forum, Shop and Contact page. We can also see how the Forum and Shop are structured.

“Well, there we have it folks - the great machinery is cranking into life and the cogs of wisdom are turning in their well oiled sprockets. JP has taken his first tentative steps out into the wider world of the web and with a little help from us will be achieving great things!

Next episode - Content – it’s all about you!”

See you then!