The basic first step is to determine who the audience is for your site. This is essential as many design and content decisions depend on this.

You need to define things such as: Is the site for children or adults? Does your target audience access the Net from work, school or home? How fast is their Internet connection? What size monitors do they use? Do they want to be informed or entertained? Make sure you know the answers to these kinds of questions from the outset.

Your site should be well organized and easily navigable, both for the benefit of your visitors and to make it easier to maintain. Map out your site using index cards to represent the prospective web pages. These can be rearranged easily, then when you are happy with the concept, put the plan on a flow chart or even a scrap of paper! Your web designer (who generally is able to help you in this area if needs be) will then put the plan into action.

Spend as much time as you can surfing the Web at this stage. Take a close look at the websites concepts, buttons, looks you like. Bear in mind that a website is a perpetual work-in-progress - which is the beauty of websites (but it can be a drudgery as well if the site is not designed to be able to include expansion or updates easily). A well planned site should be able to have new content and features easily added to it without having to redesign the site.

Some other factors to be included in the planning stage are maintenance (how often the content is to be updated) and marketing (the methods of promoting the site should be taken into account in the design of the site). It is also in this stage that you should be looking at buying your domain name, if you do not already own one.