Plan Out Your Website Before The Design Starts

Many businesses put little thought into what their website should look like and how it should be organised in terms of pages and the journey for the potential user, but any successful website design requires proper organisation and planning.

You need the website to be intuitive for users and easy to find on search engines, which means that the site should be organised well for SEO. Before you approach a web designer about the website design itself, take some time to plan the main pages and categories your website will include.

The Three-Click Rule suggests that, in terms of navigation on a website from the homepage, users should be able to find the information they are looking for within a website using no more than three mouse clicks. You should plan the structure of your website with this in mind.

The most important pages related to the products or services you offer should go in your main menu, which should be included on every page so that it is easy for visitors to navigate to the most important parts of the site.

The size of your website is obviously an important consideration at this stage. If your website will only have a few main pages and a basic structure, minimal site organisation and planning will be required, but should still be done before approaching a web design firm.

If you website is expected to be more complex and larger in size, comprising of many different pages, categories, and subcategories, then it’s even more important to plan how it will be structured.

The focus of your planning should be about your future website visitors. What are the categories that will make the most sense to them? What site structure will make it easiest for them to find what they’re visiting your website for?

Planning and then executing your structure based on that plan will give you a solid base, and then revisiting how your website is structured later on when you have some analytics and insights into visitor behaviour and patterns will allow you to further restructure and optimise if necessary.

ITSys Developments has been in business for more than 15 years, providing professional website design services to countless companies and building hundreds of websites for businesses across South Africa during that time.

ITSys will assist you to design a new website or upgrade your current website to include interactivity throughout your website, showcase your product catalogue online, develop online applications, or link it to an online ordering system to enable credit card payment on an e-commerce website store.