Website Planning Worksheet

This questionnaire is designed to enhance communications between Easley Web Solutions and our clients. Why don't you print it on your printer, and have it handy when you discuss your project on the phone with a Easley Web Solutions representative. After we've you've filled in the blanks as we talk on the phone, please make a photocopy for your records, and mail a signed copy to me. It provides a written memorandum of our mutually-agreed plan.

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 Masthead: ____________________________________

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 GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com)

Domain name ____________________________     ___Desired ___Already Registered

4. Masthead Graphic

__ 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 a band of color or a pattern running down the left margin of the webpage. Your preference:

May we include a link at the bottom of the welcome page which reads "Website Designed by Easley Web Solutions"? (You are under no obligation to say yes.)  ___Yes ___No

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.
• Colored bar "Image Map" with a brief word or two indicating each page -- or, in larger sites -- each section of the website. This appears at the bottom of every page. In some sites we put this both top and bottom. You are limited to a maximum of about eight (8) selections on this image map. We use server side image maps to make it easy to expand the site at a later time without having to change the coding on each page of the site. For this reason, and to keep costs down, we do not include separate "buttons" on our standard sites. Included in sites of 6 pages or more.
• Left-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)
• 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. (Extra charge)
• Search Engine is useful on larger sites of 20+ pages to help visitors quickly find what they're looking for. (Extra charge)

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 Arial Bold)
• Text. Body Font Style: ___________________ (recommend Times New Roman)
• Image Map by Image Map bar
• 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.
  
• Photos you supply either by sending the photos themselves for us to scan and return, or by sending the digitized images on a diskette.
  
• Stock photos obtained from ClipArt.com and other stock photo sites.
•  (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.)

• Sound, either MIDI musical background or mp3 files for music or voice.
• Animated GIF images. We make animations for an extra charge.
• Shockwave Animations
• Flash Animations
• Video clips

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. For one or two products we recommend using ShopSite Lite with a secure server. We charge extra to set up the ordering system. 

10. Web Hosting Service

We are not in the web hosting business. 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. We require cgi-bin access and FTP access, and strongly recommend telnet access. Our no-extra-cost response form also requires a Unix system with Perl language available.

Web Hosting Service _____________________________________

Phone: _____________________________

E-mail for support or help ______________________________

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

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 the first six months 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 Easley Web Solutions to construct a website, and I authorize Easley Web Solutions to use this Website Planning Worksheet as the basis of the project.

Signature _____________________________________ Date _________________

These are the items that will make up the package you'll be sending to us:

• Website Planning Worksheet (this document)
• Website Design Contract
• Website Content Worksheet which will define for us the:
  • Written content for your webpages (preferably on a disc or diskette formatted for Word for Windows or other word processor. We can translate from most word processor formats with ease.)
  • Photos or graphics to be included. You may send graphics and photos which we can scan into electronic form. Even better, send us a disc, diskette, or ZIP disk with your graphics in any popular PC format, such as GIF, JPEG, BMP, EPS, CDR, PCX, etc.). If these are in Mac format, make sure each picture has a 3-digit extension, such as .jpg to indicate the format in which it is given.
  • Your company logo (if any), and tell us the PMS color. 
• Samples of your printed materials -- brochures, letterheads, cards, booklets, etc. -- so we can see how you present your company image.
• Check for at least 50% of the total.

We are looking forward to receiving your materials and constructing your website!

Form last updated Ovtober 5, 2008