7 Things You Can't Skip When Building a Website

Building a new website might sound simple — give a designer some text and images, position a few CTAs, hand it off to a developer, release it to the world. But if you want a website that works for you (instead of being more work) and brings value to your organization, here are seven things that can't be skipped.

1. Prioritizing Goals and KPIs

If you don't set goals, you won't know if your site is serving your needs or your visitors'. Without KPIs, you can't measure progress. And having goals isn't enough — they need to be prioritized. Cost and time will always limit what can be achieved, so knowing the highest-priority goals keeps you focused when deciding what's in and what waits.

Ask: What isn't working with your current website? What are your current metrics? What are the highest-priority goals, and how will you know they've been achieved?

2. Describing Personas

It's easy to forget who a new website is being built for — the visitors. Personas identify traits, demographics, and goals of those visitors. Most sites need a handful, each distinct enough that you'll need different approaches to align their goals with yours.

Ask: Who's your current target audience? Is anyone missing? What are they looking for and how can your site help them?

3. Designing a Visual Sitemap

Without a visual sitemap, identifying all the pages (and URLs) of a site is very difficult. It also shows where the site's priorities and complexity live. Sitemaps are iterative — refine the first draft with stakeholders.

Ask: How is information structured (deep vs wide)? Does the structure reflect your priorities? Does the sitemap support your user journeys?

4. Curating Content

A sitemap isn't enough — you need content. Content managers work with stakeholders to collect, edit, and structure what's presented. Skipping curation invites copy-pasted, misaligned messaging. Curation also surfaces which content is unique and which should be centrally managed and reused.

5. Approving Wireframes and Designs

Wireframes are the blueprints — structure plus content, with limited design. They should account for unique content types (a product page vs a promotional page) and for various devices and accessibility issues. Once wireframes are approved, designers build mockups combining brand, wireframe, and content.

Starting with design is tempting because it's an easy way to get inspired — but it encourages forcing the sitemap, content, and wireframes to fit the design.

6. Aiming for Accessibility

Accessibility is too often an afterthought. There are legal requirements, but they're not the only reason to prioritize it. A search engine crawler navigates content much like someone with a visual impairment — both lack visual capabilities. If you want better SEO, optimize for accessibility.

Accessibility also addresses situational impairments. A visitor on a weak network connection needs a usable experience. Page-loading performance influences search rankings, so accommodating situational impairments helps you rank higher.

Accessible sites support more devices and use cases — and are more likely to support new device form factors as they emerge.

7. Defining a Project Scope and Plan

Everything above is the foundation. Discovery should also produce a project scope and plan. The scope is the "definition of done" — without it, scope creep impacts timeline and cost invisibly. The plan details the ideal timeline. A good plan is flexible enough to adjust for business changes (scope) and life changes (paternity leave), and identifies areas of complexity that need additional discovery time.