1. Determine your goals. Your goals will define the aspects and features that you will use on your website plus the resources such as platform, software, technology, materials, and time that you will need to create and build the website that you have in mind. Setting goals for your website development project will also help you keep track of progress and guide you towards completing the website based on what you want to achieve.

2. Define your audience. Defining your audience will help you determine the technology and the design that will prove to be most effective in order to communicate and connect to your audience. Defining your audience will help you arrive at a design and content plan for your website that will surely cater to the needs and interests of the market segment or niche audience that you have identified. Having your target audience in mind will serve as your overall guideline in choosing website features, content, and elements.

3. Decide on the overall look and feel of your website. Are you aiming for a trendy look? A corporate or business-like look and feel? Or a fashionable or sporty feel to your website. Defining the look and feel of your website will help website developers and website designers come up with a website with features that will best suit the brand or company image that you want to project in your pages. This will also help determine the type of content that you want to include in your website.

4. Create website pages that are user friendly to provide a good navigation experience to your readers and visitors. Planning on how your website will appear design wise and navigation wise will help you come up with a user-friendly website that visitors would love to navigate. Plan on how you want to present the information that you want to include in your website. Allow your website to tell a story or convey the important information that you want to communicate in the most convenient way. Make your website accessible and maintain high visibility of important information. All these can be achieved by means of planning and strategizing on how to design your website.

5. Measure and control. Visitors will often regularly visit websites that appear to be well maintained and updated. Once you have published your website, monitor and measure success. Make adjustments to areas and features that need to be improved. Constantly update content by providing new media and fresh and relevant content, keep abreast with new technologies to make your website upbeat and interactive. A website needs to be maintained in order to retain its audience base.