These two articles from SmashingMagazine are a good overview of what’s needed to start planning a new website: website architecture (essential structure), and web content (yes, it’s written differently from what you read in magazines.)
Starting Out Organized: Website Content Planning The Right Way
The article is written for enterprise-level projects, but the logic transfers to building small sites. I’ll paraphrase the outline below:
- Determine what outcomes you want from your website.
- Make a list of the types and categories of content you’ll want to publish.
- First, plan your top-level navigation first to define website sections.
- Then, plan templates for page types after.
- Step back and look at your site from the viewpoints of visitors who will be using it.
- Make changes if necessary.
- Move on to next phase (designing and developing).
Content Strategy: Optimizing Your Efforts For Success
Here’s a summary:
- Know The Purpose Of Your Content.
- Know Your Key Messages.
- Know What Your Audience Wants Next.
- Know That Everything Needs A Plan.
- Know That You Need A Great Writer.
- Remember that it will need updating, so plan for it.
The bottom line is that there’s a lot of necessary work that goes into the planning phase. And there’s the ever-lurking danger of taking too long to plan and never getting your site built — don’t do that!
My approach is to start with keyword research. In the process of developing keywords for the site, the language of the audience emerges, and forms a pattern that makes it easy to build out the rest of the site. The editorial calendar is also easier to develop once the language is known.
There’s no single ‘right way’ to plan site architecture and develop content strategy. But ignoring it is definitely the wrong way to build a site!