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Post #7: Planning My Future Website


Jumping into things without first planning them out is often a bad idea. Visualize someone spending their student loan money on the newest gaming system, someone trying to nurse a mouse back to health only to get an infestation when it escapes, or someone out on their 21st birthday out getting a face tattoo after a night on the town.
All of these scenarios are reversible, but fixing them is time-consuming, painful, and costly.
So is delaying launching your site because you didn’t plan it properly and had to scrap it and start over.

Avoiding this is as simple as planning things before you rush headfirst into them.
Make yourself a sitemap to start. It does not have to be anything fancy. Write out the pages you think you will need on some scrap paper. Draw lines to show what will link from where. What is always going to be in your navbar, and where you are going to put articles?
Once you have this basic guideline, you can begin wireframing. This isn’t about colors or typefaces, but is about the arrangement of your content on a page. You can decide if you want to embed content from social media, or where to include a box for email signups while wireframing.

When all of this is done, you can finally jump into the fun pretty design parts.  When designing consider your home page a front door. No one will want in if the screen door is falling off or the glass is broken.
Make your homepage shine, let your customers know who you are and what you do, and then lead them to where they need to be.

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