Girardi - Web Design: The Plan Before The Plan

Introduction

I would like to thank you for downloading the book, Website Design: The Plan before the Plan. This book will help you to plan out your first website. I must state that this book is not a book on programming but a book about all the steps you should take before even writing the first line of code.

If you are like me like to have your hands into everything when it comes to your business, then Im sure you have thought to yourself more than once, How hard could it be to build your own site? Its not hard at all, once you have the road map to get you from ideas in your head to a published site on the internet. I have spent the past few years developing websites not just for my own businesses but for other businesses as well.

I didnt go to college for web designing; I graduated with a Bachelors in Business Administration. As I got older, I was determined to learn how to build a website, but I didnt have the time or the resources to dedicate towards more schooling. But I was still determined to learn what I could when I did have the time to do so.

So how did I learn to build websites? I searched for hours and hours on the internet for how-to videos and online tutorials. It was a very slow process because just learning what is now the simplest of tasks took a long time to find on the internet and then to modify it and use on my new website. Trust me, it would have been cheaper (if you think of the saying time is money) to purchase a how-to book or to take a class. One issue that I found with how-to guides that I found online was that the person explaining what to do would either leave out a step or race through something that was very simplistic to him or her but not-so-simplistic to the newbie web developer.

Once I became more proficient at developing websites I told myself that I would write a book or a series of books to help those who are just as interested as I was to learn how to build a website. Now this book isnt a book entitled, How to Make Millions Online or Making Money on the Web. This book is The Plan before the Plan. Its a simple, yet informative guide to help you plan out your website before even writing a single line of code. This book is here to save you time and money by guiding you through the beginning steps of a website and hopefully preventing you from making the simple mistakes in developing your first website. Even if you have built a few sites already, there will hopefully be some ah ha moments in this book.

So enjoy and lets begin to plan our website plan.

Copyright 2016 All Rights Reserved

In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate or transmit any part of this document either in print or electronically. The information provided herein is stated to be truthful and consistent, in that any liability, in terms of intention or otherwise, by any usage or abuse of any policies, processes or directions contained within is the sole responsibility of the reader.

Chapter 1: Why Every Business Must Have a Website

The Days of Yesteryear The Yellow Pages

Lets say you are a small business owner with a brick and mortar business and you want your business to be known. Back in the olden days (mid to late 1900s), business owners would put a listing in the Yellow Pages. If they wanted more exposure for their business, they would have a bigger listing in the Yellow Pages. The listing would include the business name, address and phone number as well the business owners would also list some services or list a special to entice customers to call them versus one of their competitors in the Yellow Pages.

With the advent of the internet, businesses have turned to the web for listing information about their business. It is critical for every business, brick and mortar or online based to have a website. Let me restated that and bold it here: It is critical for every business, brick and mortar or online based business to have a website.

The Yellow Pages vs. Online Search Engines

Sure there are plenty of reviews websites and listing-type websites that will list businesses (some for free, some are paid). These sites will even list businesses even if you dont have a website for your business. However, to have your business become more legit, you need to have your own domain name and your own website personalized and tailored to your business. Later in this book we are going to model a new website around a brick and mortar business in the plumbing industry.

FUN FACT: Did you know that there are 40,000 searches a second on Google every single day. That is over 3.5 billion searches a day (reference: http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/ ). How many people do you think are opening up the Yellow Page Book to look for a business? I searched the internet for that answer; let me know if you find the answer because I couldnt.

So as I was writing this book, I did a quick search for plumbers online. 3 popped up that are near me. 2 have their own websites, 1 does not. If I was looking for a plumbing repair in my home, I would 100% of the time check out the businesses that have a website before even considering a business without a website. Later on we are going to look at 2 different plumbing companies that have their own websites so we can get an idea of how to model our new website. But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, lets do some planning.

Chapter 2: Planning our Website

Failing to Plan is planning to fail

First and foremost, you must have a plan for the site. Not to sound too clich, but failing to plan is planning to fail. There must be a reason why you are reading this book. One cannot just say, I want a website and poof, theres a website. It doesnt take a day to plan, build, develop and publish a website. But it also doesnt take a year. Your goal at this stage is to learn how to plan for your website so that when you start coding, you arent typing, Welcome to my first website just to turn around later and rewrite it into something more useful. In the next book of this series, you will learn and practice some web development skills that you will be able to use in real life settings.

What are we trying to accomplish

What do you want to accomplish with your website? In this book, we are using an example that we are planning on building a simple website for our plumbing business. Since we are a beginner web developer, it would be best to learn and practice with some static pages (informational, non-changing pages) vs. a dynamic (web page information changes based on visitors choices) web page. Our static pages will be laid out nicely and use proper techniques for color choices, fonts, images and use of whitespace.

Your website as a digital brochure

Think of these static pages like a brochure for your business. The front of the brochure would have a nice image of your business or services and some general information about your business. Turn the page of the brochure and you would see more detailed information about your services and/or products that you offer. On the back page of the brochure, you may find contact information about your business. Thats what we will be planning for our website here.

We will find basic but informative details about our business along with some nice eye-catching images. Our brochure is a tangible item that you can see and touch. We need to make our website feel like a tangible item so that our visitors can learn more about our business. So think of your website almost like a brochure, something well laid out, something with nice text and images and something where our visitor can find us and contact us.

A website can have one page or a few pages (like in our brochure concept) or a website can have 100s of pages (like a book or catalog). This would all depend on your goals and how in-depth you would like your site to be. At this level, we arent going to touch on websites like forums, shopping carts, etc. There are a lot of new terms that we will learn like layouts, CSS, Navigation, and HTML, etc., but for now lets start with the basic fundamentals.