It is said that the thing that is done without planning sometimes gets the best result. The most important word in the whole sentence is sometimes as the people who phrased it kept in mind that there are certain things which cannot be achieve without planning. Web designing falls under this category whereby planning forms the basic most integral part of the creation process. The need of the website varies according to the traffic that is intended and the product or a service that is intended on the website. One would be easily able to distinguish the comment that the website wishes to state by the first look of it. This is how planning becomes a major obsession to the developers of a website. The purpose and the content precede the planning of the website. Everything from that point on falls right into place; which software to use, how to include important information and how to be more interactive so that a good internet traffic can be maintained and many such questions are answered once the planning is done.

There are some basic guidelines which one should follow while planning for a website.

• Purpose – one must be fully aware of the purpose of making the website. It is better to have a purpose statement which would focus on what the website wants to achieve and how the users will be benefitted from it. Through this initial process the nature of the traffic is determined and therefore the developers can clearly set goals for the website. Future expansion, modification and improvement come within this particular arena.

• Audience – one of the utterly important steps in planning is to determine the audience. The targeted group is the audience who will be visiting the website for a particular reason and thereby it becomes essential to know what the audience expects from the website. The clearly defined values or the purposes of the website helps the people understand the website better and can then identify the needs with the website.

• Content – the content of the website is very important for the evaluation and the organization of the website. The specific website on a specific topic needs to be arranged according to the need of the viewer. Here comes the importance of the survey by which the developers can collect the evidence of what and what not the viewers would like to see in the website. Any items that are unsuited to the website must be deleted and the important points of reference should be highlighted to develop the content of the website better. The basic information is to be organized and the content should be categorized according to the needs of the audience.

• Compatibility and restrictions – one must keep in mind the target audience and the ways in which the website will be available to the user. A valid XHTML 1.0 is limited for the maximum of the web surfers. One has to make the website compliant to other web browsers apart from the Internet Explorer like Firefox, Opera and Safari. Image file formats becomes another thorn as the various browsers come with different technology behind them.

• SEO – the Search Engine Optimization is one of the last steps of the planning process where the keywords and the tags are to be picked up after a long scrutinizing process so that the website can be tagged with those keywords and the search engine would provide the website proper space when a related keyword is searched on the internet.

All these are very essential for the development of a good website.