Proper planning of your site will help you manage the design and build of your site. It is the most important part and often the most neglected. The type of website you are going to build will have structure, presentation, and content separate from one another. The methods you will be using is going to take into account the people who will be using your site. You will consider questions about the user’s goals, environment, and activities to help you make decisions as to how your site will look and operate as well as what will be in it.

Once the user’s needs are identified you will create scenarios that involve the user and hypothesize their thought processes and activities. There is no one right answer for any of this and it is appropriate and sometimes necessary to modify or even rebuild your site based on what you learn about the people using your site.

After research is complete you will begin making sketches of how the site should look. These decisions should be based on your research and reflect function over form. Once a layout has been decided on you will start prototyping how the structure should be coded, what attributes are associated with the structure, how the site will navigate (site map), and exactly what information will be contained in it. This plan will act as a blueprint for building your site.