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305 views13 pages

Sample Preview The Complete Website Planning Guide

Uploaded by

hanalei77
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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THE COMPLETE WEBSITE

PLANNING GUIDE

A STEP BY STEP GUIDE FOR WEBSITE


OWNERS AND AGENCIES ON HOW TO
CREATE A PRACTICAL AND SUCCESSFUL
SCOPE OF WORKS FOR YOUR NEXT WEB
DESIGN PROJECT

DARRY L KING
Copyright © 2017 by Darryl King

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or


mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief
quotations in a book review.

Published by Ireckon Pty Ltd

Requests to publish work from this book should be sent to


[email protected]

Cover Design: JD Smith

Printed by Ingram Spark


1

INTRODUCTION

Have you wondered how to get the absolute best out of your
business (or organisation) website?

Do you want to be able to have more control about the end


result and how well it will work but not be the website
builder?

Do you need to rebuild or build your first website and have


no idea where to start?

What you need is a simple website planning method


that walks you through planning, designing and
building your next web site!

WHAT CAN YOU LEARN HERE?

T his step by step process will walk you through


everything you need to know to create the plan you
need to clarify what you want from your website, what you
2 THE COMPLETE WEBSITE PLANNING GUIDE

need from your web site, and enable you to choose better
who to work with and how to know if you got what you
asked for.

This is our guide from over 17 years of scoping and building


websites and web applications; that lays out clearly for you
how to create your own scope and take control of your
website success.

This guide won't teach you how to build websites as a


designer, but it will help you get the right designer to build
the site you want and need to make your business results
grow the way you want them to. It won't teach you every skill
in depth on the particular modalities like Usability and Infor-
mation Architecture, but it will give you the starting points
for all of these that you can expand on.

The result will help improve what you do at whatever level


you are, and can be expanded on and utilised as a document
template even for experienced teams wanting a more thor-
ough plan for their clients.

WHO IS THIS GUIDE FOR?

This guide was designed for Business Owners, Marketing


Teams, and Managers that have the responsibility for their
business website

Anyone in an organisation that has the role of running their


current website, planning their next website upgrade or
building their first website will benefit from this process.

If you need to work with developers and designers to


build your site then this will help both you and them in
creating a better website.
INTRODUCTION 3

This guide was also made so that other developers and


designers can use it to help them work better with their
clients. Not every agency or developer has the capacity or
desire to build out scopes of work for the sites they build,
many would love a clear set of guidelines and marketing
information to help them do what they do better.

You only have to read the 'Clients From Hell' website to see
there is a lot of frustration on the supplier side. This guide
will help remove that frustration.

We believe that a consistent approach for all will help both


provider and client get better results, with much more infor-
mation up front and the removal of significant assumptions
and guess work.

This can be used internally within an organisation as well as


with external providers. The guide should help everyone
remove the missing piece in planning for successful websites.

WHY IS THIS GUIDE NEEDED?

Ask most business owners or marketing executives about


their experiences in building corporate web sites and you will
hear many stories about the difficulties, frustrations, and
problems they have.

Many people refer to websites as an "IT" thing (yes - still)


despite it being one of the most critical marketing and
communication tools they have.

On the developers side there is still massive frustration on


how to best get specifications, requirements and all the essen-
tial information up front so they can accurately estimate and
quote projects, but also to provide transparent and realistic
information on the key client questions of how much, how
long and what will we need to do.
4 THE COMPLETE WEBSITE PLANNING GUIDE

Everyone will get better results!

From Business Owners to Freelance Developers, Agency


Teams, Marketing Managers or Assistants, General
Managers of medium businesses, small teams to big
company project groups, by using a structured clear
human focussed scope of works.

After more than 20 years spent working with businesses and


organisations of all size and their websites and applications,
enough was enough!

Over the lifetime of our business, our team members cried out
for better scopes, clearer information and we were forever
looking for and improving on what we did. It never seemed
quite enough. There were always too many shortcuts or
missing pieces of critical information that showed up late in
the process of development that should have been discovered
earlier.

Everyone gets so excited about a new project that all the energy goes
into a push to get started and finished without taking the necessary
steps.

Many small and medium businesses don't have the breadth of


skills to help them and rely on the development team (like
ours) too much to help guide them. Not every company has
access to Online Marketing stars across areas like Information
Architecture, Usability, and Customer Journey Mapping, to
Content Management and Development.

So a blueprint was needed to help step people through a


process.
INTRODUCTION 5

If you care about your website, then this guide will help
you plan, build and get better results from it.

This book is set out in three key areas:

1. AN INTRODUCTION

Start at the beginning and grasp why a process like this matters.

Understanding the core concept behind a proper brief and


some of the common mistakes will help you think through
each step and why it is important to you.

Chapter 1: What is a website brief/scope?

Chapter 2: Common Mistakes.

2. THE FOUNDATIONS

Get these foundations done right and your site will have a very solid
structure to build on. You get to choose whether you build your
structure on sand or rock.

Setting goals for your business and the website helps you
understand what you need from your site. Determine who
you best clients are and how to help provide them solutions.
Identify items you simply can't do without which will help to
provide you the base on which to build the site.

Following up with relevant research at vital stages in the


process will complete the core information you need to go
and create a meaningful website.

Chapter 3: What’s the result you want?

Chapter 4: Who’s your audience?


6 THE COMPLETE WEBSITE PLANNING GUIDE

Chapter 5: Your business must-haves

Chapter 6: Research

3. THE BLUEPRINT

This is equivalent to architectural drawings in construction, where


you flesh out the structural detail that matters most. What will go
where and why, and what will it say.

The bulk of the work that goes into making a useful brief that
allows you to dictate the result you want is done through this
stage.

Step by step instructions on drawing site maps, writing out


the page scopes, how to wireframe (or get wire-framing done
right), the role content plays and how to address it.

Finally bringing all of this together into a useful brief docu-


ment or scope of works for your website project that can be
shared and used to choose your development team.

You become the architect of your ideal new website.

Chapter 7: Drafting a Map

Chapter 8: Scope it out

Chapter 9: Wire-framing

Chapter 10: Content is King

Chapter 11: The Final Document


2

WHAT IS A WEBSITE BRIEF OR


SCOPE

A website scope of works is a document that can fully


explain your business needs and requirements in a
practical way, used by designers and developers in quoting
and building a website.

A website scope is simply a blueprint for success. It’s a


thought-out set of drawings and specifications that allows
you to get the exact result you want, or better.

The foundations of any good web project start with proper


planning. A website brief should be extensive enough to
provide answers to almost every question a developer or
business manager might ask about your project.

Do You Have A Template?

When I ask new prospects about a brief for their new site the
most common question I hear is, "Do you have a template I
can use?"

Many companies have some form of a list of questions or


even more advanced documents, but few if any are available
8 THE COMPLETE WEBSITE PLANNING GUIDE

that help the client provide the developer a useful brief up


front.

We hope that by providing a sensible template, and the


process to complete it, more clients will be able to think
through and better design what they want and need for their
business, helping produce a better result from the develop-
ment teams they engage.

Learning to scope and brief what you need for your business
will greatly improve your business website, and will
naturally start to include many principles that lead to more
extended areas of online marketing.

Where Does It Fit In?

When you start looking at the process of building a website


and what you might need to do make it a high performer for
your company you will find there is a myriad of 'specialties'
or areas to consider, and everyone is selling the perfect
method to help you!

Advice Is Everywhere

Articles, tools, ebooks, courses, training programs and agen-


cies all exist to show you how to market your business better.
They will include all sorts of areas, for example Conversion
Optimization (CRO), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay
per click Advertising (PPC), Lead Pages, Usability / User
Experience (UX), Customer Experience (CX), the list goes on.

The Problem

All of these are vital in the ongoing marketing of your busi-


ness, especially as the site gets more mature and you under-
stand how to manage it better.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Darryl King is the founder of Ireckon an Australian based


Web Design and Development Agency based in Brisbane. He
has been actively involved in the scoping, planning and
project management of thousands of web projects.

The Complete Guide to Planning a Website was born from the


frustrations and problems the lack of suitable brief documents
caused for both his development teams as well as for clients.

After searching and trying many different functional specifi-


cation documents, advertising briefs and other simplistic
website planning tools that barely skimmed the surface of
what clients need to provide he developed and tested The
Complete Guide to Website Planning.

Darryl uses the advanced version of this process in his


consulting to clients to develop their website scoping docu-
ments and plans as well as conducting workshops, site audits
and speaking events to encourage a more thorough approach
to website planning.

Connect with Darryl online:

www.ireckon.com/contact/

(t) twitter.com/ireckon

(f) facebook.com/ireckonweb

Darryl’s Fiction site: www.dekingauthor.com


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to all the clients over more than twenty years that
have helped in creating this system and provided the knowl-
edge and learnings that make up the content of this book.

Special mention should go to the many team members over


the years who pushed me to find a better way to help them
do a better job.

For the ongoing encouragement to push this to completion


and make it happen a shoutout to Ed Pelgen of Online
Kickstart.

Thanks to Jackie Washington at Proofreading.net.au for line


editing.

Thanks to Jane Dixon Smith at JD Smith Design for the cover


design.

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