The first step in designing any website is to define your goals. Without a clearly stated mission and objective the project will drift, bog down, or continue past an appropriate endpoint. Careful planning and a clear purpose are the keys to success in building websites.

There are big questions, and the broad conceptual issues are too often dismissed as business managers push toward starting the real work of designing and building a website. However, if you cannot confidently answer these questions, then no amount of design or production effort can guarantee a useful result.

WHAT ARE YOUR GOALS?
A short statement identifying two or three goals should be the foundation of your website design. The statement should include specific strategies around which the website will be designed, how long the site design, construction, and evaluation periods will be and specific measures of how the success of the site will be evaluated.

Long-term editorial management and technical maintenance must be covered in your budget and production plans for the site. Without this perspective, your electronic publication will suffer the same fate as many corporate communications initiatives - an enthusiastic start without lasting accomplishments.

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
The next step is to identify the potential readers of your website so you can structure the site design to meet their needs and expectations. The knowledge background and needs of users will vary from tentative novices who need a carefully structured introduction to expert "power users" who may chafe at anything that seems to patronise them or delay their access to information.

Web surfers - The objective is to entice the casual browser with a compelling mix of graphics and clear statement about content. All links on your home page should point inwards, toward pages within your site. Provide concise statements of what is in the site that might interest the reader.

Novice and occasional users - Novices tend to be intimidated by complex text menus and may be tentative about delving into the site if the homepage is not attractive and clearly arranged.

Infrequent users benefit from overview pages, hierarchical maps, and design graphics and icons that will trigger their memory about where information is stored within the site. This group is always a concern for designers, but their numbers are shrinking daily as the Web becomes a mainstream business tool.

Expert and frequent users - These users depend on your site to obtain information quickly and accurately. Expert users are generally impatient with multiple low-density graphic menus that offer only a few choices at a time. Power users crave stripped-down, fast loading text menus. Graphic frou frou drives them nuts. Expert and graphic users generally have specific goals in mind and will appreciate detailed text menus, site structure outlines, comprehensive site indexes and well designed search engines that permit fast search and retrieval.

DESIGN CRITIQUES
The goal at this stage is to identify successful models in other websites and to begin to see the design problem from the user's point of view. Unfortunately, design teams rarely include members of the target audience for the website.

Group critiques are a great way to explore what makes a website successful, because everyone on the team views each site from a user's point of view. In this way you will learn one another's design sensibilities and begin to build consensus on the experience your audiences will have when they visit the finished site.

CONTENT INVENTORY
Once you have an idea of your websites medium and general structure, you can begin to assess the content you will need to realise your plans. Building an inventory or database of existing and needed content will force you to take a hard look at your existing content resources and make a detailed outline of your needs.

Once you know where you are short on content you can concentrate on those deficits and stop wasting time on areas with existing content that are ready to use. Content development is the hardest, most time-consuming part of any website development project. Starting early with a firm plan in hand will help ensure that you wont be caught later with a well-structured but empty site.