Tutorial: How to make a project plan

Ever wondered why there has to be a project plan in advance of a design? Well, how about if you hadn’t any. Then you wouldn’t be able to design specifically for the kind of visitors the website will attract. That’s just one reason why a plan comes in handy when beginning to design a website. And not only website, but almost everything you will design in your life probably needs a good plan to begin with. Below I’ll try to explain it as simple as I can in my English.

Briefing
A project plan always begins (at least how I’ve learned it) with a briefing. This briefing consists of some background information about the topic / product. Target’s for youre visitors and customers. Besides that there are some practical issues involved like the budget needed and the choice for dynamic content or static content.

Theme / Subject
This consists of a small description of the sites subject. This is harder then it looks. You should describe it in only a few words. For example: A meeting at the beach. If your theme description is to short like the beach it doesn’t meet all the information about meetings at the beach. Keep in mind that clients always want to much of information on one part of the website.

Target
In this part of a plan you describe what you want to achieve with your website. It can consist of various things like selling your products or provide information.

Target Group
The target audience is the public or the users for whom the website is. You have to know your target audience. Things you’ll need to know are: Age, education, language spoken etc. etc. The target audience will play a role in which style there should be chosen.

Research
If all of the above is finished and clear then it’s time to collect as much of information you can about the theme / subject. Not only googling your way out, but also talking to people which are located within your target audience.

Idea development
Done? Then it’s time to develop some idea’s with the information you collected above. Think about interesting and special things about your subject. Make it original or copy it in a good way. Don’t invent a wheel or upgrade it! People already did that. These sort of brainstorm sessions are chaotic most of the time, but always bring you the best idea’s. Have some pen and paper around and write down all the idea’s you mentioned.

Select Idea’s
Make a selection from the idea’s you wrote down above and decide which one fits best within the theme, target and target audience. Describe the idea a bit more thorough and your done with your first project plan!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 22:27 and is filed under Design & Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

http://crispijnverkade.nl Crispijn

Great article but I think some stages are missing in your post. After you’ve selected idea’s you have most of the time the most important stage: the development. How do you realize the project? What are the things that you have to be aware of?

Also you can specify all this stages. Maybe in next posts on your blog or in an update of this one. How do you create idea’s? Do you have multiple targets? Think further than the global description you have now.

Anyway, useful article but specify all the information a little bit more!
http://www.gerbenvanerkelens.com Gerben van Erkelens

The way that I learned it It begins with making the concept. After that you get busy with the design and the last stage is the development of your idea.

Of course in real life you often do it a whole lot different, because most of the time the project plan is already made by your customer or the target audience is already been chosen.