Creating a website can be so damn easy and make you a great deal of money. However most websites have a minuet amount of planning put into them and therefore fail. You wouldn't build a house with out blue prints , you could end up forgetting all sorts of important parts and your house would come tumbling down. Same could happen with a website, that's why i recommend you create yourself "A Master Plan". The follow guide should help you get your ideas into gear, help you understand your target audience and a 100% resourceful website in the making.

What is in it for the Visitors?

I always ask myself what is in it for them, if there isn't anything why should they come and visit my website. People love free stuff, whether its;

Free information, guides or tutorials
Videos or Audio Clips
Forums or Chat Rooms to talk with like minded people
Games and Puzzles
Free Downloads

This all depends on your target audience, a 30 year old wont want games and puzzles as much as a 14 year old, this is why its so important to know who our target audience.

Any Current Competition

Most areas of the internet are are more than accommodated, for example if you search Google for Business Forums your getting over 500 million results, you can then niche it to Female Business Forums and you would receive 3 million results. You could then further this by niching to Young Female Business Forums and you would receive 2 million results. You now have a website topic with hardly any competition if any. Here are a few other examples;

Football - Female Football - Young Female Football
Sports - Water Sports - Extreme Water Sports
Recipes - Dessert Recipes - Chocolate Dessert Recipes

Now using this technique you can cut out any competition, of course competision is always something that can make a website stronger.

How will my website make me money?

You may want to visit Monetize Your Website page for more detailed information on some of the monetizing techniques.

You got to work out what your target audience can afford and what they want to buy. For example you would recieve a larger amount of leads for the new Audi TT Coupe (which looks amazing!) on a business releated website because the people who read business websites tend to be a high class working man which could more than afford the $40,000 car. Ofcourse if you placed the same advert on a website for online gamers your get a whole surge of traffic from drelling teenages who unfortunantly could not afford the car. Some website ideas can be harder than others to monetize and you could find your self struggleing to sell them anything of value. You may want to use other monetizing techniques where you dont sell your visitors anything and decide to run Google Adsense who think they can convert your website traffic.

Promoting your Website

Most people spend 95% of there money on creating there business and 5% promoting it, this is why a lot of business's don't perform. I recommend spending 50% of your budget on various promotion techniques.

Google Adwords
News Letters
Blog Posts
Related Website's
Offline
Search Engines

Website Appearance and Layout

How would you like your website to look and where you place certain things can be very important. If your colour scheme target audience was women and you had a website which was dark and gloomy most women would close your page straight away because its ugly!

Here is a great tool, Colour Schemer alows you to browse color schemes, find inspiration, and copy your favorite hex color values without ever leaving your Dashboard. Check out nearly 3000 FREE colour combinations.

What not to do:

Light text on a dark background
Dont use ugly colour schemes
Keep graphics to a minumin
Have a slow loading webpages
Put navigation in places your visitors wont look for it
Have a flash based website (not everyone has flash)
Have a splash page (Its a page that does nothing)
Make your visitor scole before they can see what you can offer them
Change your website layout for every page