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    The Complete Website Planning Guide
    The Complete Website Planning Guide
    The Complete Website Planning Guide
    Ebook121 pages1 hour

    The Complete Website Planning Guide

    By Darryl King

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    About this ebook

    Praise for The Complete Website Planning Guide: A great, accessible and practical guide that you can quickly use to get better results from your next website build. Get to it!

    Would you build a house without blueprints and expect it to be perfect?

    That's how many people go about their web projects, with napkin drawings, spoken discussions, part finished summaries and guides and wonder why it's not finished on time, costs more than it should and people aren't happy with it.

    You can be the architect of your next website project and avoid delays, scope creep, missing functionality and extra costs.

    In The Complete Website Planning Guide you can learn how to easily create blueprints (a scope) for your, or your clients, website that will solve many of the key problems that occur in website development projects.

    After more than 20 years running a design and development agency, Darryl still couldn't find a standard way that clients and developers could outline exactly what they needed to get the job done most effectively. Most briefs or planning methods either focus on general things like platform, hosting and general design guidelines. Many agencies or freelancers still fly by the seat of their pants using their experience to guide the project.

    So he wrote this guidebook as an instruction manual to create useful site plans without missing out important requirements or needing to be overly technical.

    In this simple step-by-step guide, he walks you through the process of establishing what the website really needs to do and shows you how to do it.

    If you want to build your next website before you pick a theme and try to wedge your needs into it before you tell your designer to copy someone else's site read this book and create your website plan.

    If you are a freelancer or agency developer don't take on a client or quote a new project without helping them plan the site properly.

    Learn how to create a plan so you can avoid overruns, scope creep and lost money.

    This is the very first step you need for your next web project, download the free templates and resources, and join the facebook group where you can get advice on working through your own plan.

    There is also now a companion Workbook tht you can purchase to work through step-by-step all of the process, with additional in-depth exercises and examples.

    What readers said:

    "If you are a business owner, read it, print out the templates and have these discussions with your designers. Trust me, even if you do only a few things in this guide, your outcome will be 100% better than if you just choose your site based on the pretty colours." Ed Pelgen

    "I am a freelancer and this is what i was looking for. Darryl has used his experience in laying out the problems faced by clients and freelancers and also given some templates and methods to follow before starting a new project" Amrinder Signh

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIreckon
    Release dateAug 17, 2017
    ISBN9780648053712
    The Complete Website Planning Guide

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    • 4/5
      useful and practical book, real life examples and easy to read.
    • 1/5
      The format is broken, not a pleasant experience to read.. Perhaps theres problem of converting it to scribd

    Book preview

    The Complete Website Planning Guide - Darryl King

    1

    Introduction

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

    WHAT CAN YOU LEARN HERE?

    This 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 need from your website, 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 Information 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 utilized as a document template even for experienced teams wanting a more thorough 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 organization 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.

    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 information up front and the removal of significant assumptions and guesswork.

    This can be used internally within an organization 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 websites 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 concerning how to best get specifications, requirements and all the essential 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.

    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 -focused scope of works.

    After more than 20 years spent working with businesses and organizations 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 and 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.

    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 your 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?

    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.

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