placeblogger
Mapping Your Way To Site Success:
Site Plans for Sites at Every Level of
Development, from Idea to Postlaunch
Lisa Williams
Screenshot of Placeblogger
Placeblogger World HQ!(now with free coffee)
Cambridge, MA
placeblogger
Lisa on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lisawilliams
Lisa on Twitter: @lisawilliams
I am learning to love Facebook, so
friend me I need the support to
stick with it
Who this is for
• Non-programmers who want to build a new website or add features to/extend an existing website
• Project leaders who will be working with others on their team to set up and run a website and web strategy for a project
• Site editors and admins who have a day-to-day role in building and running a community information project.
• If you ever want to step up to design, launch and run another project.
• This was originally prepared to share with project leaders for Knight Community Information Challenge projects. For info on how you can get funding for your project, see infoneeds.org
Start writing down your performance against operational
goals – are you getting the number of posts you want per day?
Comments? Twitter followers?
Phase 5
Operations
Launch! Use your launch plan to have a great Day One. Keep
a log of the first day, and begin a bug tracker.
Phase 4
Launch
Technical development on your project begins. Begin writing
your Launch, Social Media, Content, and Metrics plans!
Phase 3
Site Development
What are your standards and goals for community building?
What are you doing each day to interact with your
community, on your site and elsewhere? What about in-
person, one on one and events?
Phase 6
Community building
Define roles to build out your team and begin recruiting and
networking. Let others read appropriate parts of your site
plan.
Phase 2
Teambuilding
Write a Site PlanPhase 1
Planning for Success
placeblogger
Why have a site plan?
placeblogger
Because if you tell a developer
Or an editor, or a journalist, or a
volunteer…
“I want a site with citizen journalism where local businesses can buy their own ads and I want people to blog but I want to be sure that nothing gets onto the front page that we don’t want there and oh we want our twitter feed to appear somewhere and we need to link our Facebook fan page and we want people to be able to rate comments and share links and upload photos and maybe we need something that works on mobile phones…”
placeblogger
You won’t get the site you want.
You’ll get whatever the developer
feels like giving you.
placeblogger
Resistance to writing things down
I haven’t convinced many people to write site plans
But the ones I have convinced aren’t driven crazy and their projects succeed
Not writing a site plan
• Is the single biggest risk you can take with your project.
• Is entirely unnecessary.
• Keeps you from really digging into your project and finding out what it’s about – writing a site plan is about THINKING IT THROUGH and DISCOVERY.
• Keeps you from building the kind of project momentum that is crucial in winning over board members, community organizations, partners, and volunteers.
placeblogger
Without a site plan you can only succeed by accident
Succeeding on purpose is SO much
more fun. Here’s how.
Entry points
• Pitch
• Team Bios/Project Inspiration
• Influences
• User Stories
• Tree Diagram/Sitemap
• Wireframes
• Feature List
placeblogger
Write a pitch
One sentence that describes your
project in a clear, concise, and
compelling way.
placeblogger
Team Bios/Project Inspiration
Developers want to know who
they’ll be working with, and why
this project is cool and important
placeblogger
Influences
List other websites that have been influential in your thinking about your project as well as
sites you use everyday, and sites whose design you like
placeblogger
User Stories
3-4 one paragraph descriptions of
typical users of your site, why they
come there, why they’d stay
placeblogger
Tree Diagram/Sitemap
A tree diagram showing your main page
and the major landing pages of your
site (don’t forget admin pages!)
placeblogger
Feature List
The big long list of features. Some people start with the list and then do wireframes,
others do wireframes first and then list everything you can click on and write down
what it does.
placeblogger
Wireframes
Simple sketches of the front page
and landing pages on your site
What is a wireframe?
• A wireframe is a grid with boxes suggesting the layout of a web page.
• Inside each grid is a UI element called a “design pattern.”
• We encounter familiar design patterns on the web every day:
• Search bar, calendar picker, search results, tabs, login box.
• You can present the same data in different ways – stories could be in a list or in a carousel (one story is shown, with left and right buttons to scroll through stories)
placeblogger
I ♥Wireframes
They give you an excuse to go out
and buy cool office supplies
Chopin Liszt
• Gridded paper 11X17 (Staples sells them)
• Mechanical pencils
• Package of fine-line multicolored pens
• Twizzlers
• Diet Coke
UI pattern sites show you examples of common web design patterns
QUICK GET A PEN!
• UI-patterns.com
• UIPatternFactory.com
• Welie.com/Patterns
• Yahoo! Design Library
• Flickr.com/groups/ilovewireframes
• Share back – put your wireframes and design patterns out there
placeblogger
Placeblogger’s original site plan was 14 pages long and had 8
wireframes
Hang it on the wall
and back up
Screenshot of Placeblogger
Accessories for the fashionable site plan
• Launch plan – what will you do on Day One?
• Content plan (how many items per day, what type, how many tweets, FB posts, who will do what)
• Metrics plan (you should share this with your developer up front so they can build in whatever analytics you’ll be using)
• Support/Operations How often do you back up? Who removes spam? Who moderates content on what days of the week? Etc.
Resources
• “Painless Functional Specifications,” by Joel
Spolsky (READ THIS IT’S GREAT)
• Original site plan for Placeblogger (14 pages
plus 8 wireframes)