‘Blueprinting’ Your New Website

Whenever you’re about to start a new site you need to come up with some basic plans for it. And of the best things about the internet is that its very easy to find your competition and really see what they’re doing on their own websites. This in turn can help you come up with your own plan or ‘blueprint’ of how you want to build up your website.

Here are a few of the basic things that I’ll look for:

Color
It seems that different industries/markets follow certain color patterns. This isn’t always the case, but I think its something to consider when starting up your site. For example, if you start looking around at your competition and you notice that most of the sites in your industry mainly use cool colors, you probably don’t want to start a site with bright flashy colors in that same industry. My personal reason for this is that I might want to stick out, but not in a bad way. Customers familiar with that industry will probably avoid my site if I don’t at least some what look like what they’re used to seeing.

Layout
This one is really based on personal preferences. Some people like their sites a little more cluttered than others. Take a look at your competitors and see what you like the best. Do you prefer to have a simple layout, or do you like more clutter and noise on the site? Can you tell if different layouts are really affecting these different sites?

Navigation
I would also recommend when you’re looking at other sites, act as if you were a customer. Is the site easy to navigate or do you find yourself getting lost fairly easily? If you find yourself getting lost, that’s a navigation problem that you don’t want to duplicate! On the other hand, if you find that a particular site is very easy to navigate then take some notes on why you think that site is easy to navigate so you can duplicate those concepts.

There are other things you can consider when looking at your competition like logos, fonts, etc. I think that the three areas listed above are the basics that you need to get under control when you start to plan out your site. The more time you take to develop a plan for what you want the site to look like, the more likely you are to come out with a site that you really are happy with.

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