Create an outline: What is the purpose of this website?

Even if you hire a website graphic designer, it will always be true that you are the one who knows your business best. This activity really helps to boil down the main concepts of your business and what you see — and ultimately what your customer will see — as important.

Sit down in front of your computer and crank up Microsoft Word. Yes, Word. Start to really think about your website and what work you expect it to do. Is the purpose to get sales calls? Is the purpose to sell flibberty-gibbets? Is the purpose to get information to the masses? Websites may well have multiple purposes (and probably should), but these purposes all have to be ranked by importance. Find your most important purpose and make sure your website hollers that from the rooftops in a meaningful way. Type these purposes out at the beginning of your document to remind you throughout this process.

During this process, in order to really hone your thoughts, try to think from your potential or current customers' perspective; what is important to them? This will help craft your message and how you deliver it.

Sample outline of a website design

So what does an outline look like? Just a few pages in Word with bullets and sub-bullets. We will be using a simple example of a sales-driven company selling, ah yes, the beloved Flibberty-Gibbet. Each bullet represents a distinct section — a page — of your website:

Purpose: www.flibberty-gibbets.com is the secondary sales vehicle to bring customers into our brick-and-mortar Flibberty-Gibbet, Inc. stores.

1  Homepage

• Homepage item 1   • Homepage item 2   • Homepage item 3

2  About Flibberty-Gibbets

• Our history   • Why you should care about Flibberty-Gibbets

3  Browse all of our Flibberty-Gibbets

• Collection page of thumbnail images showing our entire collection, paginated accordingly

4  Special offers

• Buy 5 Flibberty-Gibbets, get 2 free! Ends Sept. 31   • Get a free whos-a-whatsit with every purchase greater than $100

5  Contact us

• Our address   • Our main email addresses   • Our phone number

This is the beginning of a simple 5-page website. As you can see, each of the pages has a distinct purpose that all funnel to the main purpose of selling Flibberty-Gibbets. From here, seeing what content must be written to fill these pages is much easier to see.