Good planning can save you time, money and frustration.

There is no easy formula for producing the perfect web site but there is a lot you can do to make a good one.

Before rushing into making your pages or whistling up some fancy graphics, or dreaming of vast hordes of eager visitors enthusiastically surfing your site, stop and think. Think about what you really want to do and why you want to do it. Think about who your site is intended for and how you are going to put it all together.

A little thought can go a very long way towards a successful web site; and this is equally true if you plan to do all the work yourself or if you are going to hire someone else to do it for you. A little planning can save you money, time and frustration. Let's face it, would you go and buy a car without having some idea of what kind of car you want, which features are important to you and how much you want to spend? The same thing applies to the web.

Companies can and do devote a great deal of time and money to their advertising, their brochures and their corporate image. Award-winning globally successful advertising campaigns don't just happen: the company that advertises well has spent time either in-house or with their advertising and PR agencies, planning researching and devising the campaign.

So how do you get to grips with a project like a web site? Planning relies on good information. The more information you give yourself before you start the easier it will be. But very often when we try to quantify our ideas, we find them slipping away from us, leaving only a foggy impression of a great idea. The following sections are here to help you to get through the fog.

The Goals:
What are you trying to achieve? Do you have a clear idea of what you expect your web site to do? If you don't have a strong sense of what your site is for it will be confused and weak. If you can't see the target how can you take aim? Understanding exactly what you want from your site is your foundation.

The Audience:
As important as knowing your goals, understanding your target audience is the second step in the planning process. With knowledge of your audience you can tailor your content and presentation to suit their needs and keep them coming back for more.

Brainstorming:
Using brainstorming to generate ideas is fun and can produce some surprising results.

Structure:
When you've got your results you'll start to assemble a structure using your goals and target audience as a yardstick to measure those ideas against.

The Flowchart:
Organising the emerging content into a flowchart will help you to see the overall structure of your site. Writing up a content list will give you a chance to assess the amount of work involved and the material you need to complete the project. At this point you might find that it's going to take six months and cost a small fortune!

The Storyboard:
A visual map that will give you and other members of your team an outline of the site on a page by page basis. It may change quite radically as your ideas for the look and layout of your site develop, but in its final version the storyboard is your blueprint from which you construct the site.

Style:
Once you've followed all these processes through you should have a lot more information about your site. This can often mean you want to re-think the look and feel of your site now that you've got a clearer and more focused idea of what you want to do.