5 Tips to Planning a New Website

Start by translating your plan into a wireframe, which is a simple layout of your site without any design elements. Once agreed upon, transform this blueprint into a design. Be careful to keep the design clean and simple, and have it reviewed early and often by your developer. Incorporate some room for the errors and obstacles that will invariably arise.

Some good advice from Site Ninja is:

• Put content first. Create efficient, searchable, accessible, multi-platform content and make sure it reaches users through the best interactive experience possible.
• Talk about the needs of your clients, not your services. It's not your services but your willingness to engage your visitors to find out what they need that is compelling. Instead of a dentist talking about all the procedures offered, he or she could think more about the patients' perspective: "Are you worried that dental work will hurt? Our clients rave about their pain-free experiences".
• Don't overwhelm with content on the homepage. You don't need to provide full descriptions of every product and service. Rather, you should welcome visitors into the site explore further. One solid rule of thumb is to feature only those products or services that represent the bulk of your business on the homepage.
• Create a call to action. Provide an incentive why potential clients should reach out and start building a relationship with you. You could offer a free study or white paper in exchange for an email address or ask a different thought-provoking question each week that you can write about in your blog, social media or newsletters. Then you could distribute the content to the respondents.
• Don't forget onsite SEO. Structure each page of your content so that there is a single focus and include these critical items for search engines so you appear high in results related to your products and services.
• • Page title
  • Keywords in the URL
  • H1 heading titles in the body of the page
  • Additional heading titles on the page
  • Images with alt text
  • Videos
  • Bold and italic words
  • Links between pages of your website
  • Links to high "domain authority" websites

4. Incorporate Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics