Website Planning Worksheet

This questionnaire is designed to enhance communications between Orlando Web Development and our clients. We suggest that you print it on your printer, and have it handy when you discuss your project on the phone with an Orlando Web Development representative.

Organization Name: _______________________________________________

1. Purpose

Give the most important purpose a "1", next most important a "2". Leave those blank which do not interest you at all.
__ To gain a favorable impression of the company or organization.
__ To develop a qualified list of prospects
__ To sell products directly taking credit card information over the Internet
__ To encourage potential customers to contact us by phone or mail to consummate a sale.
__ To make available product information and price lists to distributors.
__ To make available product information and price lists to customers.
__ To strengthen brand identification.
__ Other _______________________________________________________

2. Site Organization

Please label pages you desire and cross out the rest.

Total number of pages decided upon ________________

 

3. Site and Domain Names

Site Name on Website Header: ____________________________________

Domain Name It must be registered through your web hosting service and approved by a domain registration service before you can use it. You may check the availability of your domain name at BlueHost.com

Domain name ____________________________     ___Desired ___Already Registered

4. Masthead Graphic

It is very helpful if you will include a copy of your company's letterhead, brochures, catalog, etc. so we can see how you present your company image.

__ Company Logo incorporated in the website header? If so, please enclose a color copy. 
__ Photo or drawing of product?
__ Typeface preference __________________________________________

__ Preferred colors in palette (PMS colors?) _______________________________________

__ Other ideas _________________________________________________________

 

5. Color and Accents

For the most part, we recommend a white background for best readability and contrast, with color harmony throughout the rest of the webpage. Your preference:

6. Navigation System

The navigation system of all our Standard Website Packages includes:

  • Links from the front page and sectional pages to every page in the system to enable Web search engines to "spider" and index content on every page.
  • Left-Side or Right-Side Menus with text links are especially useful on larger sites. Included in sites of 6 pages or more. They can allow more detail than an 8-item bottom image map, and can enable visitors to see from any page how to get to any other. These may be white or light-colored over a dark left-side color or pattern, or black or dark over a light left-side color or pattern.

Optional Systems. Circle those you wish incorporated in your site.

  • Left-Side "Buttons" can be used, but we do not recommend them, since they are more expensive and time consuming to maintain when a change or addition is made to the system. Also, it takes significantly longer to load many buttons than an image map of the same area (Extra charge).  Orlando Web Development now develops menu and navigation systems using DHTML / CSS and or Flash.
  • Frames System where, typically, a scrolling menu remains on the left side to provide navigation. We do not recommend frames in practically any situation, since they are a design disaster. They do not always print out, cannot be bookmarked easily, and often make the page design look "tacky" with their ugly gray scroll bars. We see them as the amateur's way to look cool. In a very few cases, they are useful: (1) to display large databases of information, (2) purposely hide URLs of content pages, (3) send visitors to other sites while making it easy for them to come back.
  • Search Engine is useful on larger sites of 20+ pages to help visitors quickly find what they're looking for.

 

7. Basic Page Elements

These are the important items which appear on nearly every webpage on your site (except the "home" page).

  • Page titles which show at top of Web browser only
  • Top-of-page graphic based on the design of the masthead graphic
  • Page Title in larger type. Heading Font Style: ________________ (recommend Verdana Bold)
  • Text. Body Font Style: ___________________ (recommend Verdana)
  • Standard company ID near bottom of page
  • E-mail response link to the following e-mail address: _________________________
  • Copyright and trademark information in small print at the bottom of every page. What registered trademarks, trademarks, and service marks does your company want to indicate here?

Do you have any trademarks or service marks? If so, please list them here and indicate which are registered trademarks.

 

8. Photos, Graphics, Animations, Sound, and Video

Our contract includes a statement that you own the copyright to, or have permission from the copyright owner to use any photos or graphics you send us.

  • Clipart tends to look a bit tacky on websites. We recommend photos except for situations where clip art is used for logo components or other artwork.
  • Photos you supply either by sending the photos themselves for us to scan and return, or by sending the digitized images on a diskette in a JPEG (.jpg), GIFF (.gif) PDF, or PNG format.
  • Stock photos obtained from IstockPhoto.com or Gettimages.com (You write down the photo number and inform us of your choices, and which page each photo goes on. We can help you select the photos, but we would need to bill you for our time at our hourly rate.)  For an extra charge, we can equip your webpages with: (Some website design packages include a flash movie)
  • Sound, either MIDI musical background, streaming Real Audio, MP3, or Flash for music or voice.
  • Animated GIF images. High quality photo images are available from IStockPhoto.com and other sources. We can also make animations for an extra charge.
  • FLASH 8 Animations
  • Video clips   ( YOUTUBE.com, MPEG, AVI, FLV, etc)
  • iPIX® 360 degree visual experience

9. Response Forms

What is the purpose of your response form?

  • __ Guestbook for visitors to record comments
  • __ Request for information
  • __ Survey of customer preferences

Note: We do not set up sites that use the response form as an order form, since these require secure servers, and secure order pick-up. Orders forms may be used to send an e-mail message for a representative to contact them about a certain item or service. Payments will not be sent online. This is not very effective for successful e-commerce. For one or two products we recommend using Paypal® with a secure server. We charge extra to set up the ordering system. 

 

10. Web Hosting Service

We offer affordable and secure hosting for all of our customers. We recommend to our clients web hosting services tailored to their specific needs. We've worked with dozens of hosting services -- the good, the bad, and the ugly. We usually do not recommend hosting on your local dial-up ISP, since they too often are not well-prepared to meet specialized business site hosting needs. Their main business is usually dial-up access, and hosting is only a sideline for them. Please let us recommend a Web host service for you if you decide not to host with Orlando WEB Development. We require cgi-bin access and FTP access and occasionally need a Miva enabled server or one with a SQL datbase included in the hosting plan.

____ I want to host with Orlando WEB Development. Standard Managed Small Business Hosting Package is $14.95 a month.

Other Web Hosting Service _____________________________________

Phone: _____________________________

E-mail for support or help ______________________________ Username: ___________  Password: ____________________

11. Registering and Advertising Your Website

Consider:

  • Advertising your Website to Web search engines that index the Web
  • Giving customers a good reason to come by offering them something
  • Finding industry-wide linking pages and negotiating reciprocal links to and from their webpages.
  • Purchasing Web advertising
  • Becoming active in several of the thousands of Internet news groups and mailing lists
  • Developing a "signature" mini-ad attached to all your e-mail messages
  • Making your website part of one or more of the many "malls."
  • Including your e-mail and Web addresses on all your company's print literature, stationery, and display advertising
  • E-mail newsletters

Information about number of visitors to your website can usually be obtained from your hosting provider. Orlando WEB Development includes "Webalizer" statistics with your very own administrative user name and password. We do not include page counters on our Standard Website Packages because it is not considered good taste in modern website design.

We submit your information to Web search engines to "register" your website after final payment is received. Before doing this we work with you to get 50 to 100 keywords and a carefully constructed 25-word sentence contain the most important keywords.

12. Maintenance

Target Date____________________

Package prices include minor updating over a two week period once the website has been published to the WWW. of the contract. This covers minor price changes, product changes, etc. It does not include major changes, such as changing newsletter content (which essentially involves constructing a new webpage), which is billed at our hourly rate.

Target Date for final payment to be made and your Web Site to be advertised: _____________

On behalf of my organization I approve the above plan which I have developed with Orlando Web Development to construct a website to be made available to all OWD employees and / or subcontrators that may work on this project, and I authorize Orlando Web Development to use this Website Planning Worksheet as the basis of the project.

Signature _____________________________________ Date _________________