How to Plan Your Website

Planning is a crucial step in building an effective website. The following tips can help you plan the content and navigation of your site.

  1. Set An Objective
  2. Brainstorm
  3. Arrange & Prioritize Content
  4. Create A Graphic Design
  5. Building Your Website

1) Set an Objective

Before planning your navigation consider:

2) Brainstorm

What kind of information do you want to provide and how do you want your audience to be able to interact with your site? Get together with key people in your department or group and write down their suggestions. Ask your audience and test ideas on focus groups.

3) Arrange and Prioritize Content

After you have brainstormed content, ask yourself, what areas are most important in supporting your ultimate site goals and objectives? Identify these elements and begin to visualize how the reader will logically identify with the information. Terms that you use within your department or group may not be meaningful to your audience. What will be most important to your reader? Is this content something you'd like accessed from every page? Think about how you want the reader to navigate your site content. You're goal at this stage is to begin visualizing how the site will navigate. Consider content organization from your audience's perspective, not your perspective.

Make a visual flow chart

Use an organization flow chart model, or boxes with lines that link to sub categories. Or use a traditional outline format that is purely text-based. Identify your global navigation (links that should be included on all pages) and subgroups of these areas. Keep your site objectives and goals in mind as you prioritize information.

Writing and finalize your content

It is a good idea to have most of your content finalized before you start working on your graphic design. Ideally the content should drive your graphic design instead of the graphic design driving your content. As you write your content, you may want to be conscious of your editorial style and search engine optimization techniques.

4) Create a Graphic Design

As you plan your graphic design, you may want to look at designs of other websites that have a similar audience or content focus to get inspiration or simply browse the World Wide Web for designs that area appealing. While you think of your design ideas, you want to keep into account BCC’s College fonts and colors as well as BCC's Logo use guidelines.

BCC offers a few templates to get you started with creating your website design. You can also create your website design from scratch. If you don’t have the artistic or technical expertise to create a graphic design, there are a few resources available to get assistance.

5) Build Your Site

At this stage, you should have a solid organization structure -- either in flow chart or outline form; graphics (if you're planning on using them); and your site content compiled. You may build your site using a BCC site template or create your own. If you are just a beginner and don't know where to start, you can learn a lot about site design by surfing the web for ideas. We've posted just a few of some of the great sites out there that offer step by step tutorials and training. You may also want to customize one of the BCC website templates provided on this site.

The BCC Faculty Resource Center and Continuing Education also offer training in web authoring in a more formal classroom environment. Check class listings on the Employee Training and Tracking tool through MyBCC or on the Continuing Education class schedule.