You need a support system to constantly manage new content that satisfies your visitors thirst for relevant information.

There is a milestone for most websites when you get more input from your actual visitors than you did from your keyword research. Typically this is around 60 pages, but can be much earlier on a site that encourages visitor involvement.

Whether you are building a site for yourself, a client, or employer, you should check that the plan includes plenty of features that involve your visitors. Contact forms are essential, but you should also include newsletter sign-ups, polls, comments, and a forum.

At first, you will build pages to the original site plan. Your keywords and topics will be driven from that plan – almost always a result of keyword research. That plan is an expectation of your visitors interests. As visitor input grows, you need to refine your original, pre-launch plan.

I used to see the planning stage of launching a new small business website as being quite separate from controlling the site once it was launched.

I soon realized this was wrong, and that website management procedures must return to and refine the pre-launch plan throughout the life of the site. More importantly, the planning and management procedures must not be separate from the day-to-day content building, publishing, and promotion activities.

Now I see how the planning, building and publishing steps can all be integrated to save massive amounts of time, whilst maintaining focus on profitability, market penetration or whatever strategic goals you seek. That integration giving feedback and measurement of goals is an added bonus. A very powerful added bonus.

I include that time saving integration, and feedback bonus, in my small business web site development tools.

I have enhanced my keyword research tool to

1. Make it easier to plan niche and authority sites
2. Monitor progress of that plan after site launch
3. Expand the plan based on visitor requirements feedback
4. Measure actual rewards against the plan

I will continue to develop and describe the main part of the current site planning tool on my keyword research website. Once I finish the installation wizard, and automate the progress and feedback procedures, the site planning tool will become a module of a much more complete small business web site development package.

For the next few weeks, I will continue to present the site planning tool in spreadsheet format, and support it via my niche marketing site. Please note that, although the site has a niche market focus, the same techniques are perfectly valid for authority sites.

To integrate it more easily into my site development package, I will port the tool from spreadsheet to database format and present it as a WordPress plug-in.

This is mainly alpha/beta software at the moment, so I am developing and testing on my own sites. If you want to get involved with this project on one of your planned, newly launched, or mature sites, please get in touch.

I have called the first part Essential Plug-ins. These are ones that any self-respecting WordPress web business needs. Some may have alternatives. I have selected ones that I know work. If you know of alternatives that you think are better, please let me know.

I noticed one or two that I rely on, but haven’t mentioned in this blog, so I will mention them now.

cforms II is a very useful form manager that I found when I had difficulty trying to get Dagon Design Form Mailer to display a group of checkboxes on a form. The Dagon Design Form Mailer is very good, but I find cforms II even better. The first form takes a little getting used to, as the method of setting up the fields is slightly unusual. However, it is quite easy to learn, and very powerful. It has many components and styling options. Though not enabled by default, it also has data tracking capabilities. This is a boon for survey and customer satisfaction forms – essential for all business websites.

WP-Cache is essential for busy web business sites. WordPress normally builds and serves each page whenever it is requested. WP-Cache simply stores these pages when they are first requested, and serves them from it’s store. You can specify how often they are refreshed.

No automated business website builder would be complete without a few non-essential add-ons. In the final wizard, there will be some optional plug-ins, with recommendations about when they are useful. Blogrolls are often a personal choice, but they are essential for serious web business site builders. No business can thrive in isolation, and blogrolls are the ideal way to show your key business associations. Often, these breakdown into separate categories. Single Bookmark Category List is a great plug-in for showing selected categories (up to 9) in separate lists.

So that is my business website builder wizard started, with a long way to go. If you know of any WordPress plug-ins that you feel are vital to a successful web business site, please let me know.