Topics typical, no doubt of the web business owner who tries to cover all aspects of building a site.

After a few days of tinkering with technical aspects of WordPress and its extensive collection of plugins and themes, I have come to the conclusion that I’ve lost the plot!

When I launched this site, I was clear that I wanted it to focus on the technical aspects of running a business. The aspects that a large enterprise would handover to the IT department. The aspects that a one man business either learns, or farms out to a website developer and hosting service. My strategy was to document the development of websites as I built them, including documentation of this site.

I set these objectives over 2 years ago and last worked on the site over 18 months ago. The plan is out-of-date, and it is seriously hampering the relaunch. It proves the strength of a well laid-out plan.

So before you start on building your web business, make sure the plan is set. If you’ve been running for a while, make sure the plan is current.

The planning process is beyond the scope of this website. I’ll be back soon with the pointers to the best way to build a plan. In the meantime, heed the warning. If you work for yourself, don’t start building the website without a current web business plan. If you are designing and building a website for a client, do not start without their current web business plan.

One exception is the very basic site for existing businesses. It needs a privacy policy and a contact page. Most web businesses also need to encourage feedback and interaction beyond simple commenting on your own articles. Therefore, a forum is important, and you can start one with a general group and a ‘Please Help’ forum. I’ll cover this in more detail in the next post.

Without the plan, you simply end up with a series of articles that do not relate to each other. Categories are so vital to making a website work. As time passes, you can tweak them. But when you don’t do it, or leave the plan unmanaged for 18 months, you end up with this – a rambling out of context article that you cannot even categorize.

Pitfalls and problems might be a good category to add – but never add categories on-the-fly, unless they are in the web business plan.