Guide to planning a web site project

Planning a website project can be a daunting task, especially if it's your first time.  Thankfully, the key to a successful project isn't that complicated. By planning ahead, considering your audience and goals you'll greatly increase your chances of success.  Here's a simple guide to help you through the planning phase of your project.  Every project is unique, but if you stick to these phases you'll have most of the bases covered.

Whether you’re putting together a request for tender or a quote, this should help.

 

Phase 1. Information Architecture
Project Discovery	High-level discovery meeting between the web company and the client. We use our project planner to discuss business objectives, content, target audience, and define functional requirements.
Site Map Generation.	A useable sitemap is created that contains a page by page index of the content information structure. To accompany this, a flow chart is created,  which shows the relationship between different sections of the site.
Quality Assurances & Checks	Client review and progress report.
Content Inventory, Aggregation and Triage.	Gather together as much of the core content as possible. This includes any new content as well as old content from an existing site.

Phase 2. Design
Creative Discovery	Discuss the site audience, user needs and brand guidelines.
Quality Assurances & Checks	Client review and progress report.
Wireframing	List of all design elements that are to be displayed on the home page. With this list, several different wireframe layouts are designed. We find this the easiest way to ensure the mockups are on target. It's easier to change a wireframe than a polished mockup.
Generate Initial Mockups.	Based on the wireframes, an initial set of mockups are created. We usually create 2 initial mockups, get feedback and progress to secondary mockups.
Secondary Mockups.	Based on the initial mockups a set of secondary mockups are created to cater for pages other than the home page.
Production ready designs.	Production ready Photoshop or Fireworks files are created, ready for the development phase.

Phase 3. Development
Technical Discovery	Review the project to date and validate the technology requirements (& assumptions).
Technical Collaboration / Client Review Session	Client review and progress report.
SEO/SEM Review Session	Plan the URL's, page titles, meta data, etc. Search engine optimisation shouln't be an afterthought.
Template Development	Based on the production ready designs, html templates are developed.
Content Management System	Integration of templates into a CMS. Create custom functionality as required. We use Django for the majority of our projects but have also used Wordpress for simple sites, and expression engine for others. The CMS of choice should reflect the client needs.
Browser Testing & Client Review	Test all functionality and review site in all major browser/platform combinations.
Launch	Final testing and launch.

Related tags: Planning, SEO