Have you been asked to develop or renew your company’s website? It can be a daunting task, with so many decisions to make along the way to launch date. Whether you’re a novice or web veteran, a successful website begins with a good plan to keep you on track, on message, and on budget.

We’ve prepared eight key questions to get you started. Spend some time to answer them fully, and you’ll be well on your way to making a website that will do you, your team, and your company proud.

Website Planning Questions

1. What is our BRAND?

• Who are you?
• What service or product are you offering on this website?
• What unique quality can you capitalize on that cannot be copied by your competitors?
• How do you want to express your brand’s personality in tone and manner? Are you traditional or modern? Serious or playful? Authoritative or collaborative? etc.
• Does your company already have an established brand? If so, how will it apply to your website?
• What will you name your website?
• Consider any background information about your company that will be relevant.

2. Who is our AUDIENCE?

• Who do you want to reach with your website? Identify your primary and secondary audiences.
• Prioritize your audiences based on how much value each audience brings to your business objectives.
• What are their habits and demographics?
• Is your audience web-savvy?
• What needs of theirs do you want to address? These are user objectives.
• Think about activities and tasks that will help audience fulfill user objectives.

3.  What is our site’s PURPOSE?

• What are the primary and secondary business objective of your website?
• How will success criteria be defined?
• Think about content strategy and key messages.
• Think about calls to action that will help fulfill success criteria.
• Consider what you want your audience to do or walk away with.
• Think about how to balance both business objectives and user/audience objectives (they will likely differ).
• Think about search engine optimization (SEO) objectives. For example, are there certain search terms you’d like to rank well with?

4. How will our site answer our COMPETITION?

• Who are your competitors?
• How does their web presence address your/their audience’s needs?
• How can you differentiate your web presence from theirs while still addressing your audience’s needs?

5. What TECHNICAL FEATURES will our site require?

• Does your website need to include one or more of the following:
• a database
• forms
• newsletter
• name or subscriber collection
• large file downloading/viewing
• current news
• shopping cart
• viewer comments
• social media
• forum
• blog
• marketing initiatives?

• If you answered yes to any of the above, try to elaborate and verbalize your requirements.
• Think about any accessibility requirements your website may need to oblige by.

6. What HUMAN RESOURCES will our site require?

• What stakeholders do you need to involve in decision-making, collaboration and approvals?
• Who will act as client liaison for the whole project?
• Who will collect, organize and supply content – including facts, background and photography?
• Who will write or provide the copy?
• Who will design and who will program your site?
• Who will maintain your site?
• Who will market your site?

7. What BUDGETARY RESOURCES will our site require?

• How much are you willing to spend:
• to build your site
• to maintain your site on a monthly basis
• to market your site?

8. What is our TIMELINE?

• How much time do you have to spend:
• to plan your site
• to prepare content
• to design your site
• to set up your site in html
• to test your site?

Your answers will form the foundation of your website development plan, and act as key reference points for future decision-making.

Now you’re ready for preliminary talks with your implementation team. Each member (project manager, writer, designer, programmer) will have questions of their own. Thanks to your advance planning, you’ll be well-equipped to tackle new questions and lead your team through the process.

So you’d like to get a shiny new website…and you want to be able to add and edit the content yourself? Well then, make sure your website has a Content Management System (CMS) built in, or else you’ll have to call up your website designer every time you need to make a change (or rely on a tech-savvy relative who knows how to program HTML code). With the right CMS, you’ll quickly find that managing your own website can be fun and empowering!

A CMS provides a control panel that runs in your web browser and allows you to manage the content of your website without needing any special software installed on your computer, and without the need for coding ability. You’ll have the power to publish blog entries, correct a spelling mistake, swap a photo, update your email address, edit a slideshow, display a video, and more:

• Adding, moving, and deleting pages
• Defining the page hierarchy
• Applying custom categories to blog entries and pages
• Creating headings, sub-headings, and paragraph text
• Formatting text with a set of formatting buttons similar to Microsoft Word
• Adding callout text (asides) to page content
• Inserting images to accompany text
• Inserting tables into page content
• Uploading PDF files and other documents
• Creating links to files and other web pages
• Managing website navigation menus
• Managing page titles and descriptions for search engine optimization

In fact, a CMS can be even more powerful that all that.  Store drafts for future publication, allow multiple members of your organization to manage the site, and even assign different roles to different people. A CMS manages permissions and user roles, so different people can have access to different parts of your website. Some members of your team, for example, could contribute to your blog, while others retain exclusive editing rights to other pages on the site. Perhaps you’d like your audience to register for you site to access exclusive content, or simply to sign up for a newsletter.  A CMS handles that as well and can show you the contact information of everyone who signs up. A CMS can be a great security tool as well. Page revisions can be saved so you can revert back if necessary, and backups of your entire website can take place weekly, daily, or even hourly.

With the proper initial setup and customization, a CMS can do as much or as little as needed for your specific website. Custom processes can be configured to match the precise structure of your website. Websites can be designed to fulfill a lot of different functions, and a website’s CMS should be tailored accordingly.  Here at Neglia Design, we use WordPress as our CMS of choice (links to other blog post) and customize it for each and every project.

When shopping for a website, be sure to ask about the Content Management System that will be used.  There are several good options – it doesn’t have to be WordPress – but be sure there is a CMS of some kind, and that it matches the requirements and abilities of your team.

So you’ve been tasked with getting a new website built. Well if you don’t know already, you’ve actually been tasked with getting two websites built. The first website is the public site that members of the public see when they visit your web address. The second website is just for you and your team; it’s the content management system (CMS) that you will use to update the content on your public site.  If there’s one thing you should know about it, it’s that the development of your CMS should get just as much attention as the rest of your web development project.

Choosing a CMS can potentially be overwhelming, with almost 200 CMS systems available. Before selecting a specific system, its important to understand the three broad classes of CMS: the Proprietary CMS, the Vendor Supported CMS, and the Open-Source CMS.

You’ll bump into a Proprietary CMS if you’ve selected a web team that has developed its very own CMS that gets used only for their projects.  You may have an existing relationship with just such a team, and it makes sense to hire them for your website project. This could, however, be a pitfall, because a proprietary CMS can be problematic in a couple of ways.  First, if there is any special functionality required (i.e. plugins), it may need to be build from scratch just for your project, at a high cost to you. Second, if for whatever reason your relationship with that web team ends sometime down the road, your site is trapped inside a system that no one outside that team understands.

Vendor Supported CMS’s are not tied to a specific web development team, but they are still tied to a specific vendor, who provides technical support for their product.  While there may be online communities that provide support voluntarily as well, if their vendor goes out of business, your website is then stuck in an aging system that is not longer actively supported.  Furthermore, purchased CMS’s can vary greatly in price, from a few hunded dollars to tens of thousands of dollars. Finally, adding plugins can be costly here as well.

Open-Source CMS’s solve all these problems by opening their systems to the wisdom of crowds and the economies of scale.  Huge, vibrant ecosystems have developed around these systems. Millions of users provide feedback, so systems quickly evolve through extensive use “out in the wild.” Hundered of thousands of programmers understand these systems well and can easily take over development of existing site built on these platforms. Thousands of volunteers around the world build these CMS systems themselves and release them for free. Thousands more generously donate their efforts in the spirit of open-source technology by releasing free or inexpensive plugins that extend the core CMS to do virtually anything. Technical support and tutorials are extensive and free of charge. In all these cases, a single person or team’s efforts can benefit everyone, not just a single project.

Here are Neglia, we use an Open-Source CMS called WordPress as our CMS of choice.  WordPress is the most commonly used CMS in the world, encompassing approximately half of the CMS market. Some major websites that are built on WordPress include wired.com, mashable.com, salon.com, and smashingmagazine.com.

One of the reasons WordPress is so widespread, is that it is also a hugely popular blogging platform (wordpress.com hosts almost 35 million blogs). Indeed, the default installation of WordPress, even when used as a CMS for a non-blog website, is clearly catered towards blogs.  Certain features need to be activated “under the hood” to enable its advanced functions, such as custom content types, custom meta fields, and advanced permissions management.  Only then does it become as powerful as some of its competitors (such as Joomla, Drupal, or ExpressionEngine)

We recommend WordPress as our CMS of choice for a lot of reasons, but really, it’s because we’ve tried several other systems, and both our team and our clients are happiest with WordPress. It has the best user interface out there – a beautifully designed control panel gives our clients confidence when they’re making updates to their site. From a technical standpoint, advanced features are selectively activated, keeping the system efficient. It is only as resource-heavy as it needs to be for any given project, ensuring site loading times that are as fast as possible.  And like other Open-Source systems, WordPress code is widely understood and easily transferred to new web team if necessary.  It’s a technology that is understood by thousands of developers, not just our own small team.

We also feel WordPress is the most responsible choice going forward for most of our projects.  Sites grow and change over time, and a system like WordPress will always be updated to match future developments in the digital space. WordPress has been steadily increasing in popularity and is not going anywhere anytime soon.  If you need to rebuild your site in the future, your data can stay within the WordPress database and won’t need to be migrated.  Instead, a new site can be build around your existing data.

Thought it offers a lot of advantages, WordPress is definitely not the best choice for every possible project. For advanced e-commerce sites, or websites that are more like applications, requiring their audiences to create something or perform other complex tasks, there are other tools required, and will require a significant custom programming effort. WordPress shines brightest when used for websites who’s primary goal is providing information. To be sure, it did start out as a blogging platform, so it is perfectly at home accepting reader comments, creating user profiles, and even creating basic online stores.

WordPress It is also a system that needs to be handled with care. Like any CMS, in the wrong hands, a WordPress-powered website can become an unwieldy mess, both on the public side an in the control panel. If WordPress is going to be used to build a custom website (rather than simply using a pre-existing template), it needs to be done by a professional to ensure the site doesn’t break down over time, and to ensure the control panel is set up to make your life as easy as possible.

Getting back to the present, there are decisions to be made.  If you’ve been tasked with getting a website built, you really need to get two websites built, and we can help with both.