Site Planning is Crucial!
If you are thinking about, or you are in the process of creating
a new site, you will most definitely find this article
interesting and maybe even inspiring. Actually the term
'interesting' is not quite what I thought as I slowly and
painfully reconstructed the pages on my mother's website several
times over.
I wanted to create a site that was going to be both incredibly
user friendly and informative, and at the same time earn a bit
of revenue from Google Adsense! Why not?
So with this great little idea, I blindly set off and started to
create what was going to be a online resource of complimentary
recipes on www.mom2me.com.
This brings me to my biggest and most costly mistake ever. Lack
of planning!
I cannot stress the importance of this aspect enough. I would
have saved myself literally weeks, if not months, by simply
sitting down with a piece of paper and planning my layout
carefully.
In all fairness to myself, I must say that I am not a site
designer by any stretch of the imagination, but was rather
finding my way around the wonderful world of web design and pain
by an uncalculated process of trial and error.
In summary: Plan, plan and then plan some more.
If you still doubt why I stress the importance of planning, I
will explain in practical terms what happened to me in the
creation of my site. If this doesn't bring the message home,
nothing will!
Scripts in the Header section of your site. As I mentioned
earlier, I really wanted to make the site simple and easy to
navigate. All the recipes on the site should be easy to copy,
paste, mail to a friend and even bookmark.
Well, this is where my first blunder crept in. I decided to make
use of some great little scripts on the site to enable users to
mail recipes to friends at the touch of a button and also
bookmark the page rather effortlessly.
The scripts were really simple to incorporate, but after doing
about 100 recipes, I read an article explaining the dangers of
adding 'full' scripts in the header section of your pages. I
learnt that by adding to many scripts in this section of the
page makes it difficult for the 'bots' to read the content and
that it could adversely effect your Page rank and Search engine
placing.
This is not a good idea as you might imagine and thus I spent
several days rewriting every single page and placing the scripts
into separate JavaScript files. This was not the last time I did
this!
Search Facility I really wanted to make it easy for visitors to
be able to search for content on my site but I decide to leave
that as a phase two of my development. Mistake!
After stumbling across Google's great 'search my site" facility
I decided to add it to my site. Great idea, but due to the fact
that I didn't add proper Meta Keywords on every page I had a
small problem to overcome.
Yep you guessed it. I had to redo every single page on the site
yet again. Ouch!
The base tag functionality Deciding to make use of the base tag
functionality within Dream Weaver was a great idea to simplify
my designing process, but...
When finely it was time to create my sitemap I suddenly realized
that I had countless (almost a hundred) broken links and
although it was my own stupidity I still had to re-do almost all
my links, on all my pages. Watch out for this. It is an absolute
spirit crusher!
My advise, make use of the full URL in all your links on all
your pages i.e. http://www.mom2me.com/promo.htm
Site Navigation I have left the best for last. Due to a complete
and utter lack of proper planning, I realized that I omitted a
section of the site for people to sign up for my Newsletter.
As everybody who has probably ever done a site knows, this is a
crucial part of your site. Whether you are selling directly from
your site or whether you plan to do mailing campaigns at a later
stage with some marketing material on them, it is crucial to
collect as many e-mail addresses as possible, as often as
possible.
Well, this forced me to redo the very basics of my pages and ...
yup redo every single page again.
Now, by now you might feel sorry for me or you might just feel
that I am a complete and utter idiot. Regardless of your
feelings, I think that from this very practical example it is
abundantly obvious that a lack of proper planning will only lead
to heart ache and countless sleepless nights. (I think I
actually have even less hair!)
Plan your site carefully and live happily ever after!