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Planning a website that will achieve the goals you have set for your business is probably the most difficult part of the entire Internet marketing process.  Yet, most people completely bypass this important step or, worse, just turn the whole project over to a website designer to handle. 

By strategically planning your new website or an update of your existing website, you will ensure you have a marketing piece that showcases your business to its best, allows you to be in control of ongoing content updates, and achieves the goals you have set for your business.  Here are a few steps to use in the planning process:

1.  List all the information about your product or service that a visitor to your website might be interested in knowing.  For example, visitors to a school’s website would probably want to know the attendance levels, size of the classrooms, information on staff members and what sports they can participate in.  Try to list every possible topic about your industry, service or product that a visitor to your new website might be interested in knowing.

2.  Put yourself into the visitor’s shoes.  Visit and review some websites similar to the one you will offer as if you were a potential customer.  As a visitor who is genuinely interested in your product or service, what are the good things and bad things about each site you visit?  Are you inspired to take action from the website?  Are you able to find what you are looking for quickly and easily? Are there a lot of pages to navigate through to get to what you are looking for?  Note all this data down with the intent of making your new website as easy for your visitors to use as possible.

3.  Research to find out what keywords your visitors might search for. Google has a free keyword research tool that will work fine for this purpose.  Type in a general phrase such as “high school” and see what other keywords come up.  These are the topics that people are searching for already.  By arming yourself with this information, you will be able to plan your website to answer their questions right away. 

4.  Make sure to plan your website to grow.  Avoid websites that can’t be easily expanded to add more pages or products.  A website is not static, but rather should change constantly to meet your customer needs. 

5.  Plan a website that you can control, rather than be at the mercy of a web designer to make even small changes to your website.   Today’s dynamic Internet marketing environment demands new and fresh content added to your website often, and the old fashioned sites that rely on a web developer to make changes just won’t work anymore.  You need a website platform that will allow you to add website content fast and simply.

Your website is most often one of the biggest marketing expenses your business will encounter.  Don’t waste it with an inferior website that doesn’t support your business objectives. 

Marty Dickinson is the founder of HereNextYear, Inc., a full service Internet marketing company in business for over 10 years. His specialty is Internet marketing solutions for the small business owner, speakers and authors. Visit to see what HereNextYear has to offer and to learn more about their innovative new website packages fully integrated for ease with social networking and other Internet marketing strategies.