How is a Web Site Planned?

Building a web site is a project that often has many people with a vested interest in driving that project in a certain direction.

Web sites cannot be designed and built by committee. Someone needs to take responsibility for making decisions. Ask 10 people if they like the design and they'll all have different opinions about what should be done to improve what (in most cases) a professional designer with lots of experience has come up with. All that will happen is that the designer will feel disconnected from the process and the design will end up being something that tries to please everybody and pleases nobody.

When it comes to the content and site structure, one has to drive the other. If the project is small then it probably has little impact which way round this is.

Once the project gets bigger then it is usually better if one person comes up with a flexible site map and then that is used to drive the content.

What a site map does is provide, on paper, a list of 'holes' that need to be filled. With a large project, involving lots of content providers it will be much easier to give them a 'hole' to fill with content. If lots of departments are asked for content without being told where the content will go then they will be creating different structures which will just lead to problems later.

For example, imagine you're building a web site for a supermarket. You ask the pet food department for their content and you ask the breakfast cereal department for their content.

The pet food department break down their content by animal, and then alpabetically by the brand of the food in question. That makes sense.

The breakfast cereal department break down their content alphabetically by brand, and then by type (wheat, oats, bran, etc). That makes sense too.

Neither department is right, neither is wrong and both will fight their case as if their life depended on it.

There needs to be one person who decides the breakdown at the start. They then go to each department and give them a piece of paper with instructions on how to provide the content.

You then have a uniform batch of content that will make building the rest of the web site that much quicker.

With any part of the site, one person has to make the decisions. It can be a consultative process but probably shouldn't be democratic. If a concensus exists then go with it. If it's totally split then talk to us. We'll probably have an opinion based on case history that might just help.