I have been thinking of redoing my website for a while and have started to work on it today. Have created hundreds of websites and programs for the last 16 years for small and big companies so it is not to start. Still to save time and frustration, it pays to do some prep work.
Personally I like to work on paper first before going to the computer and start working. It is much easier to change in paper than have to recode or redesign everything. Even if you are not going to design or code the website, it would save you time and money having an outline and some details of what you want.
Here are at least a few questions to find out:
1) Why do I need a website? What are the purposes?
2) Who are my target audience?
3) What kind of technolog? Open Source PHP, Perl or Microsoft .Net
4) What is the website address? (www.????.com). Better to choose an easy to remember name and people are more used to the .com domains.
5) Where will the website be hosted?
6) What are my timeline that I want the website to be done?
7) What is my budget?
8) Would I be able to manage the site myself or would need the programmer/designer to do the updates? Many times whoever design it could also provide a Content Management System (CMS) tool that allow the update of the site. If you use Wordpress or Joomla, there are tools for that too.
9) Do you have a layout or design of how the site looks like?
There are a long list of items that I need to check and double-check before I feel comfortable moving to the next part which is to design the layout in paper and then have it done in Photoshop, which I am looking to talk about on my Day 4.
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