As the famous Benjamin Franklin quote goes; if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.
That also holds true when it comes to building a website. You have to plan to ensure you understand good site design, what your content will be about, and the essential features that make a good website.
This is why you need to create a website blueprint before jumping into building. Aside from detailing the website itself, a blueprint covers external environments like your target audience and competitors.
Keep reading as I take you through the factors that should be included in your website blueprint. By the end of this article, you’ll have a solid idea of what you need to prepare.
1. Define your website’s primary goals
All websites serve different purposes. As such, knowing the focus of your website should be the first point on your planning list.
Setting a clear goal helps to identify appropriate content and web design. It also guides you to craft a better strategy for increasing conversion rates and generating leads.
Most importantly, a good website blueprint helps you measure the success or failure of the objectives you’ve set.
Here are some of the best examples of a website’s goals:
- Becoming an authoritative resource in your industry. Build a brand by sharing reliable information regularly. This will be beneficial in the future when you pivot to make money from your site.
- Generating leads. Make sure to build a website that can capture customers’ attention and encourage them to check out what you have to offer.
- Increasing conversion rates, which is the percentage of users who carry out a desired action on your website. The goal varies — it can be subscribing to your newsletter, purchasing an item, or reading specific articles.
2. Understand your target market audience
Many businesses say that their target market is everyone. While it’s true anyone can be interested in your business, having a well-defined audience gives you an edge to help you succeed.
It’s also easier to research and understand your audience’s expectations when a specific target market has been defined.
Here are some tips to find and understand your perfect audience:
- Analyze the current customer base. Look for common characteristics in your existing customer base, such as their age, location, and income. After that, divide them again and determine the group that can bring the most sales.
- Observe your competitors. If you don’t have a customer base yet, try to analyze your competitors and see who they’re targeting. You can go for the same audience or target a smaller, underserved market.
- Brainstorm solutions to your potential customers’ problems. Conduct a random survey or invite existing customers to participate in your research. You can also visit online forums related to your industry to discover common pain points.
- Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. When you put yourself mentally in their situations, it’s easier to understand what they want from your site.
You can use Google Trends and Think with Google to understand current trends and customer behavior.
There’s also Pew Research Center, where you can discover data about internet usage, social and demographic trends, and more.
3. Draft a website flow that helps you and your audience
One of the most important factors when creating a website is the flow. It defines a site’s structure and ensures a good customer experience.
Drafting a website flow also makes it easier to visualize how users reach a particular page. If the path is too complicated, you can remove certain locations and streamline the whole process.
As the first step, imagine a rough path that users need to take to complete an action. For instance, shoppers will go through these steps when purchasing an item:
- Users land on your home page from search engines or other advertising pages
- Users see your products page with a clear CTA (call-to-action) button
- Users add products to cart and do any other desired action
- A payment confirmation page pops out
- A successful payment page appears once the transaction is over
- Users are redirected to a thank you page or back to the homepage
4. Include the necessary pages to create that flow
Once you’ve figured out the steps needed to achieve a certain goal, make a list of your pages to create the best site flow.
Let’s use an eCommerce flow above as an example. Based on the draft, your website needs pages for your products, checkout process, payment notification, and order confirmation.
To help you visualize the draft, make use of a website planning tool like Lucidchart and Axure RP. Create a flowchart with them, and remove or add new pages to come up with a better flow.
The pages you need to include depend on the type of the site, expectations of your target audience, and the goals of your website itself.
5. Include other required pages and content
At this point, you already have the necessary elements to achieve your site’s primary goal. However, your website won’t be complete without these must-have pages:
- Homepage — the front page of your site. It should include a navigation bar to direct users to other pages, call to action, social icons, and attractive visual elements.
- About page — describes what you do and what you offer.
- Disclaimer and legal pages — describe how the website is used and legal terms connected to it.
- Contact information pages — a contact page with a phone number, email address, and links to social media platforms.
Depending on the type of website you’re building, you may not need these pages, but for eCommerce, you likely will.
6. Outline the website structure starting from the home page
The steps above help us draft your website content. Now it’s time to link them together to create the site structure or site map.
Your sitemap defines the hierarchy of the pages and how they connect to each other.
The best way to create this is to draw a flowchart. You can use the website planner tools mentioned above or simply draw them yourself.
Above all, keep in mind that the site should be easy to navigate. As a rule of thumb, your navigation bar shouldn’t have more than two to three sublevels. Beyond that, users will have a hard time finding important information.
7. Optimize where possible to achieve a smooth navigation
Once you’re done outlining the site, go over it again and look for parts to optimize to achieve smooth site navigation. Try to trim down and simplify the structure in your website blueprint to boost the site’s usability.
Plus, the simpler your site structure is, the better your SEO will be. Search engines prefer websites with a clear structure since they’re easier to crawl.
8. Assign the key metrics and goals of every page
All web pages play a role in the success of your website. As such, having essential key metrics help you measure their performance and direct your focus on other pages that bring results.
Each page should have different key metrics and goals.
For example, a blog post promoting your products has to rank well on certain keywords to get the words out there. Meanwhile, if it’s a product page, it’s important to set a conversion goal to determine whether you’re making enough sales and profit.
Here are some of the most essential key metrics you should consider:
- Site’s traffic — the number of users who visited a page within a certain period of time.
- Traffic source — it could be search engines, ads, referral links, or other websites.
- Time spent on a page — the ideal rate varies depending on the length of the page, but a high average rate can indicate that the page is engaging.
- Bounce rates — the number of visitors who leave the page without doing any further actions, usually due to poor page performance and bad content.
- Interactions per visit — more interactions mean that the page is successful in encouraging visitors to explore your site.
Do we really need a website blueprint to plan out a site’s design?
If you’re still unsure why you need to create a website blueprint, here are some of its advantages to convince you:
- Eliminate risks. With thorough planning and research, you don’t have to grasp in the dark and perform many trials and errors.
- Efficient. Thanks to a website blueprint, everyone in the team knows what your goals are and what they need to do. What’s more, you can easily divide the work and assign priorities.
- Create targeted content, which is based on your target audience and the goal of each page.
- Create a better user experience for users. All crucial aspects like content, navigation, and flow are planned to make a great impression on your visitors.
- Manage expectations. You know what your website is going to look like, so there’s no risk that the web design and features are not as you hoped.
Once you have the website blueprint ready, use a website builder for fast results. Zyro is one of my favorites when it comes to website building.
Zyro is an all-around website builder that’s affordable, flexible, and easy to use. With it, creating and publishing a website only takes a few hours.
This website builder comes with beautiful templates, free image library, and eCommerce features if you want to create an online store. The site editor is also very intuitive, with a drag-and-drop function so you can place any element on the desired spot.
What’s impressive, Zyro is equipped with AI-driven tools to help kickstart your business. There’s AI Writer to create SEO-friendly content, logo maker, blog title generator, and even a business name generator.
Pick one of Zyro ‘s plans and give it a try for 30 days. Then feel free to ask for a full refund if you think the platform is not for you.
The price starts from $1.99 to $13.99 a month, each with different features and perks. The starting plan offers 3GB of bandwidth, 1 GB of storage, and an option to use a custom domain.
Create your website blueprint and build the website of your dream!
Creating a website design takes a lot of planning and preparation. It can be overwhelming to plan out everything without a clear structure, and that’s why a website blueprint comes in handy.
In this article, I’ve shared the necessary steps to create a high-quality website blueprint — one that can guide you to realize your vision. Moreover, it’s possible to execute the blueprint more effectively with the help of a website builder like Zyro.
I hope this has been helpful, and you can go build a blueprint of your dream website now.
If you click affiliate links in my post and buy a service, I might receive a small commission.
