Website

Website Planning

Ask yourself the following question: “What goes into creating a website?” The correct answer to this question is planning. When creating a website, you need:

A topic
A purpose
Goals
Multiple Webpages
Content
Layout
Design

The above list is part of the planning process when it comes to creating a website. In this article, I’ll discuss the various aspects of website planning. Each step of the plan is essential to creating your own websites; whether it’s a personal website, business website, fan website, etc.

TOPIC, PURPOSE AND GOALS

You may think that the topic, purpose and goals of a website are the same thing. When I first started designing websites, I thought so too. However, that is not the case. The topic, purpose and goals of a website are all different things and they each play their own role in the website planning process.

TOPIC

The topic of a website is what the website is about. For example; if you create a website related to the many different Apple products that Apple offers, then the topic of your website will be Apple products.

PURPOSE

The purpose of a website is why the website is being created. Going back to the website about Apple products, the purpose of the website could be a couple of different things:

Selling or exchanging of Apple products.
Providing information to the general public about some of the best Apple products.

GOALS

Goals are objectives that you want your website to reach for you. For example; the Apple product website, dealing with the selling and exchanging of Apple products, might have the following goals:

Increase monthly sales by 10%.
Increase customer base by 5% by the end of 2015.
Promotions will increase the amount of traffic to the website.

Goals usually consist of at least three objectives. The first goal should be the hardest to reach and the last should be the easiest.

TARGET AUDIENCE

Though a target audience was not introduced as part of the planning process, it is very important. The target audience is the people you are trying to reach with your website. For example; the website about Apple products may try to reach out to people who like Apple products. The age range of the target audience might be 13 years old to 50 years old.

It’s important to keep the target audience in mind when you create any website. If you were to create a website for children, you would want the website to be colorful and interactive as that would make the website more enjoyable for children.

WEBPAGES

When creating a website, you need to create multiple webpages. All websites should include ALL of the following pages:

Home – The home page usually consists of various different things such as articles and images that link to other parts or pages of the website.
About – The about page usually consists of information about an individual, company, product, etc., depending on the website’s topic and purpose.
Contact – The contact page usually consists of: contact form and or contact information such as an email address, address, phone number, and or links to various social media accounts associated with a specific person, company, or product. (This information will vary depending on the type of website and its purpose).

CONTENT

Content creation is an important part of the website planning process. Content includes text, images, audio, video, etc. When creating a website, it’s a good idea to plan your content. You need to know what you want to say and to whom (your target audience). You’ll want to pick out any pictures, video, and audio files you will want displayed on your website and pages. If you are going to have videos, make sure you pre-record them so they are ready when it’s time to add your content.

LAYOUT AND DESIGN

The layout and design work together to create the look and feel of your website. The easiest way to achieve a look you want is to sketch it out. You can create a sketch by hand, or by using various design programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Paint, Paint Shop Pro, and others. You may choose that you want all of your pages to look the same; you may want them to look different. HTML and CSS are one of the many ways people design the look and feel of their website.

Full Review by Lucky!

You can access Twenty7c to see for yourself what it looks like, by clicking here.

Scoring:

First Impressions & Appearance – (17 out of 20)

I have looked through your website before and I was intrigued by it, so I am happy to go deeper into it and look at the nitty-gritty. What I like to do in this section is to break things down into different areas of focus to make it easier to read.

Navigation bar
Your navigation bar is very simplistic, which fits well with the overall theme. It spotlights your logo really well and the logo fits nicely as well. Across the top, you have the links for the main categories for articles that are published on Twenty7c, which I love right off the bat. As a guest, I don’t want to have to look around for what I want, I want it to be right there for me to find, so nicely done. To the right of the links, you have a really simple search feature that offers a subtle drop-down holding the actual search function, I like it! However, one thing that I must comment about the search function is the flow of which it opens and closes. The animations that leads and follows it opening and closing is jumpy and often times took an awkward second to open, which isn’t the biggest issue, but I am nit-picking.

Main Content
Looking at all of the main content, I see a quick spotlight of some of the articles posted in the “Tech” and “Psychology” categories, followed by a larger preview of the “Curiosity” category. Something that I would do, if you have control of it, is to make that larger preview something that really sparks my “curiosity” and makes me click on the link to view the full article. When I was looking around before writing this review, I saw an article that was touched on maybe we know why people dream. Personally, I clicked on the link because I wanted to read more, because it’s a topic that I have consistently wondered. If that were intended to be placed on that larger preview on the homepage, I feel it would help with user engagement and time spent on your site because people would read the main article and click on another related article because they’re hooked. Something that I noticed scrolling down to the footer is you have two instances of “Connect” and “Tags”, which is inconstant. If you ask me, I think your homepage should show-off your articles first and foremost. Then have the “Connect” and “Tags” left in the footer like they are now. Not only do they look better down there, but it makes your articles the focal point on your homepage, which is important. I like the list of articles that I can scroll through and see a slight preview of the article before I read it, which makes user engagement that much better. After typing this section, I had to suggest something. On both of my monitors, the content seems to run into the background, and it is hard to see the box-shadow on the edge of the main content. When I opened up my Chrome Dev Tools, I found that changing “box-shadow” to “0 0 30px -10px #000” defined your edges better and helped to see where the edge stops and the background starts.

Footer
I really like your footer that you are using, it is simple and contains things that I feel are really important to include. Number one, you have your mission statement ready for the user to read what twenty7c is all about, which is nice to see from a guest’s view. I see a list of the latest posts which I can click-through and read. Subsequent to that, we see the tags feature, which I commented on above regarding removing the one on the homepage but leaving this one in tack. Something that I have to comment on is the placement of the: “Home”, “About Us”, and the “Contact Us” links. They look “odd” placed in that space where they are now and I would personally place them inside your description as anchor text.

Site Layout – (18 out of 20)
This is the one section that I was pleased to comment on after I looked through the different categories and articles. The articles are beautifully laid out in the homepage and the respective categories. This is very important because you never want to let your guest’s have to spend time looking for content, because it will only cause them to click off your site because of guests’s make judgement before actually looking in deeper. However, this is not the case on twenty7c, so nice job! Looking at the layout within reading an article is really nice too! You have a cover image for each article followed by the main category in which it is posted in and the title, which just makes it look that much better. Near the bottom of the article, you have the writer’s bio followed by the comment section. If you want my honest opinion, you rocked this entire section! I was really impressed.

Statistics and Activity – (11 out of 20)
This is where my positive view of twenty7c kind of took a turn for the bad. While I love your articles and most of them are really well written and are meticulous in length and content, I hate to say that some of them are old too. Something that I noticed was the absence of more current posts, in different categories. When a guest now comes to look at your website, the first thing they want to see is a thriving website, that makes them think there is always going to be new content for them to read and comment on. However, if everyday they come back hoping to read new articles and they see the same posts they have already read, hate to say it, but they will just look away and won’t come back. Now, I did see you have re-launched twenty7c on the 19th of July, which was a little over a month ago. Within a months time, I would have liked to have seen a little more content both article wise and comment wise. Something that I used when I use to write articles was offer a question at the end of the article, something that would offer users a reason to comment, and it paid off really well.

Content – (15 out of 20)
The articles that I did read were awesome! Not only did most of them offer quite the length to read, but most of them were a really nice read. I did learn some things just in my time reading what I did than I did beforehand, and that’s impressive! For the most part, the articles were really nice and if you keep up that expectation, the amount of articles on twenty7c would be higher and the quality of them would be the same. The niche of twenty7c is really interesting because you answer peoples inquires about life, which is interesting to a lot of people. For example, I really didn’t know that much about the stock market, but after reading the article explaining it, I felt like I actually learned enough to tell someone else what it was. Content like this is what makes a website professional and will make people thrive for your content because it answers what they don’t know. For someone like me that is really inquisitive, that is imperative to keep your readership.

Spelling/Grammar & Professionalism – (17 out of 20)
Looking into the user posted content, you did well with this section. I used a grammar tool to cross check certain posts and they did fairly well. Most of what my tools found were simple grammar issues and often times offered suggestions for different use of words based on the context of the article. However, I really didn’t find anything that raised an eyebrow or anything that comes out and slaps you in the face, spelling wise. I would defiantly keep up on checking user content before it’s posted though, you don’t want to let the quality of posts slip, because it will be difficult to fix after that.

Total Score – (78 out of 100)

Final Remarks:
Overall, I am very pleased with the look of twenty7c. I feel like the niche is one that would attract a lot of people that are thirsty for knowledge. Other than the few points that I touched on. I think you have a solid foundation to build on and I am excited to see where you take twenty7c and your writers as well. Keep posting interesting stories and I feel you will find a large readership. Best of luck!

Strengths: