The Importance of Website Planning

If you currently have a website, what do you like/dislike about it?

Chances are a lot of time and thought went into your existing website. Over time you may have discovered users are not engaging in the way you had hoped, elements are missing or the site simply hasn’t kept up with changing technology and trends (for example, being mobile responsive). Letting your site’s team know what is or is not working can help them plan for additional features, functionality, content or layout modifications to ensure the site performs well for your audience.

Do you intend to update content yourself?

If you do, your website planning team will discuss the available in-house resources and skill sets in order to select the best content management system (CMS) for you. Prominent CMSes have their own strengths and weaknesses and must be evaluated in relation to the specific needs you’ve outlined in earlier steps of the project.

Do you intend to provide user-restricted content?

Your web team will need to know in advance if your site will provide secure content to users in order to investigate options such as membership systems, user group plugins for content management systems and other login features, as well as the need for an SSL certificate for secure data transfer.

Time and again, we’ve heard companies gripe about saving all their website edits — minor or major — because it was so expensive to have their webmaster go in to make changes. Those days are gone. We’ll empower you so someone at your company has the ability to post blogs, write website pages, add events, fix typos and more. If it makes sense for your company, we can offer you control over being able to make updates and edits to your site.

On the flip side, we have several clients who do not have the hours in the day or the staff in-house for content creation and updates. In those cases, we act as website manager, making edits, writing and publishing blog posts, making additions to pages, and performing routine maintenance.

We know that choosing and/or switching CMSes is a big undertaking. The needs of your customers will guide us in deciding which system is ideal to support both your business objectives and the future growth of your digital presence.

Wireframes as a guideline

When content is written to fit in the framework determined by the wireframes, authoring the content into the site can be simple. It can truly be as easy as copying and pasting into various sections or modules within the template. How closely the final content follows the wireframe or design determines how quickly and easily it can be authored into the site.

One challenge is, we don’t always create a wireframe every page of the site. For a second- or third-level page, we may only wireframe a semi-generic example. Sometimes we discover that the wireframe or a page within one section of a site doesn’t satisfy the content needs of another section of the site. (Consider product detail pages. Product type A has a certain set of information, but Product type B may have a different set of information.)

When this occurs during the authoring process, some design decisions might need to be made on the fly, based on the content. That can pose a challenge. The web developer and content creator are generally different people in the project, which means they may need to come together to devise a solution.

Even if we were to wireframe every template, page or section, the wireframes don’t always satisfy the messaging needs. Remember, they are a template or guide created often before content is written. Additional design elements or content modules may need to be added to specific pages in order to accommodate any variation between the wireframes and the final content.

These occurrences cause content authoring to take some time, as we convene a collaboration between content and design in order to accommodate changes.

Another potential challenge of content authoring involves imagery. The authoring process includes collecting all images that will augment text, whether they’re icons, photos or other graphic elements. If the supplied photos aren’t all sufficient – perhaps they are low-quality or the company no longer has the license to use them – the content author or another member of the development team may need to update page designs for that area or spend time searching for alternate photos.

Worst-case, you may have to hire a photographer or develop graphics or iconography from scratch. Again, this can slow the content development process.

That said, it’s very difficult to plan for every design element during the initial design phase. We’re creating guidelines at that time and not the final product. Development and authoring becomes more time consuming when we run into these alignment issues. As much as we plan, sometimes, as we dig into the actual messaging needed for the site, we find additional needs.

And yet, the initial wireframing is still an important – and time-saving – part of the process. Imagine how long it would take a developer if they had zero idea what to expect for content.

Design for functionality

Keeping the Bauhaus school of art’s principal in mind, a page’s design directly reflects what it needs to do. The look is all about the user and their pathways through the site.

If your audience is younger, the design can take some risks. These users are savvy enough to navigate around and get themselves back and forth on the site. Whereas, website users who are older and may be newer to an online experience need more basic, intuitive ways to get back to the top of the page or back to your homepage.

Website design includes understanding iconography, architecture and flow — and making every element work together so it’s all easy on the eye and simple to use. It’s less about what pleases a designer and more about leading the audience on a journeytyo a specific destination via an aesthetically pleasing, intuitive presentation — which takes us to the second guideline:

Don’t be too precious

At Savoir Faire, we take this seriously – not just with design but with everything we do for our clients. You’re the client and we deliver what you want. That said, we advise and explain why certain things are best practices, but ultimately, you get what you want. This means we won’t be too precious about colors, fonts, headline sizes, image choices, rows, columns, captions, videos, icon placement — we can go on and on. Guideline three is:

Evaluate and test

Make sure your design choices allow your audience to do what they need/want to do. For example, is a “submit” button too small to click on a phone? If someone can’t click something, that creates issues with the user’s ability to convert.

One way we tackle this early – to save everyone involved time and money – is creating wireframes for some site pages (remember them from above?). These are skeleton pages without fancy colors and distracting images, so we can all evaluate the functionality of the page overall and not focus on the details to be added later. 

Next ask, do we have visual cues that assist the hierarchy of the page and guide interaction? Yes! Great, now we can begin thinking “pretty” or “fun” — if pretty and fun works for your audience.

We look at trends (but don’t always follow them). It’s important to see what works well for others in a variety of industries, culling ideas and evaluating how those ideas could benefit our clients — and their clients.

At this stage, it’s essential to make sure the functionality operates as intended. Then, we check the navigation to ensure all links go to the proper pages or points on a page. The content links get tested. We view pages for any missing images, and any areas where might see consistency issues. 

For example, a single page heading that should match on all similarly-designed pages may accidentally have a variance in font size or color that needs adjusting.

Next, we check that all images have proper sizing. Sometimes, when working with images, we might initially add them to a site page at a larger size than they need to be for optimal viewing. Here, we adjust the image size dimensions to match the proper display size, which often makes the files smaller and improves page speed loading.

How does it look – everywhere?

Then, we anticipate what Google sees as a mobile-friendly perspective. We may make some minor adjustments to content to make them more Google-friendly, such as:

• The phone number properly links
• There’s ample space between navigational elements for mobile touch
• The text is large enough for mobile viewing

By the time the site is sent to the client, ideally there will be little left to adjust, because we’re not making any major changes to design or content at this stage. Everything has been approved at various steps along the way. 

That said, there may be some tweaks necessary before launch, based on the client’s feedback. Sometimes those bullets that looked great in the design comp don’t look quite as great with the content in them. Maybe there’s too much or too little content.

Migration plugins such as Backup Buddy, Duplicator or All-in-One WP Migration do a good job of finding and replacing URLs. But having a true staging site or one-click staging site within the hosting makes things easier in terms of launching the updated version.

Other things that make launching easier are knowing where the domain is registered and where the organization’s email is hosted.

It is not uncommon for hosting, domain registration and email to exist in separate locations. For example, we might build a website on SiteGround, but the domain may be registered with GoDaddy and the email may be hosted by Google using GSuite.

In this case, we will need to evaluate how the domain points to different services and update accordingly. This is known as updating the DNS or pointing the DNS. Unfortunately, while this should be easy, we sometimes need to untangle a web of services and DNS records/references to be sure everything works correctly.

In a perfect world, we just need to back up the live site and “push” the new site to the live environment to launch the new version. Or, we just need to point the domain to the new version of the website. But more often, especially when replacing a site rather than launching a brand-new site, we need to do a bit more work to ensure no information is lost, email remains functioning and there is minimal downtime.  

Once the new site is “showing” at the organization’s domain, we go back through and QA again, specifically looking for any references to the staging site and checking for broken links or images and implementing any redirects that need to be put in place (for retired content or replaced pages). We retest the forms and otherwise ensure everything is working as expected.

We want every client to be completely satisfied with a new site once it launches. This means there is typically some back and forth fine-tuning post-launch. We always build sites with best practices and the client’s best interests in mind. We want all parties to be proud of the end product.

We embrace the theory that launching a website is a starting point, not a finish line. To take advantage of this opportunity, we recommend implementing a content marketing program to both increase visibility in search queries and rankings, and to generate qualified leads.

Website maintenance isn’t only about the technology

Your content says a lot about your business. With so many buyers starting their buying process with online research, your website needs to make a good first impression. Latest news that hasn’t been updated in two years doesn’t say much about your business. Additionally, Google will penalize you in search results for out-of-date information and page structure. Regular website maintenance should include a review of site content to ensure it is up-to-date and accurate.

Whether it’s content updates, software updates or performance updates, monthly reviews and edits can take time. But not making them can affect your site and your bottom line. At minimum, you should be making sure you have a monthly plan in place that includes regular full backups, regular software and plugin updates, and regular cleanup of files, cache and database. A well-tuned website, like a well-tuned car, will perform better and present fewer large-scale problems in the future.