Free Website Planner

The Website Planner is a free tool that walks you through planning a website the way we would on a client project, one stage at a time. You answer a few questions about your business, and it takes you through the same sequence a good agency follows: sizing up your competitors, mapping the pages, briefing the content, setting the design direction and writing the technical spec, right through to launch. At the end you get a written plan you can act on yourself or hand to a developer.

Every site we build goes through these nine stages before a line of code is written, and the tool is that process made self-serve. It sits alongside our other free tools. Below is what each stage covers, so you can follow the thinking whether or not you run the tool.

How the website planner works

You move through ten screens, from your basic details to a finished plan. Each stage produces one clear output that feeds the next: the competitor read shapes the sitemap, the sitemap shapes the content briefs, the briefs shape the wireframes, and so on down to the build. It plans the work rather than doing the creative for you. It won’t design your logo or write your pages, but it tells each of those jobs exactly what they need to deliver. If you want a brochure site live by Friday, this is more planning than you need. If you want a site that earns its place, this is where it starts.

The nine stages of a website plan

1. Competitors

Most businesses know who they compete with on the high street and guess at who they compete with online. Those are rarely the same list. Search the terms a customer would type, in an incognito window so your own history doesn’t skew the results, and note the sites that keep coming up. Check the local map pack too. Shortlist four to eight real rivals, and for each one note their offer, the proof they show, and how fast the site loads on a phone. The weakness that runs across all of them is the opening your site is built to take.

2. Research

With the shortlist set, take each site apart across four angles: the pages they publish and how they group them, the platform they run on and how quickly it loads, their on-page SEO and structured data, and the running order of sections that does their selling. Mark every finding as something worth copying, something to avoid, or a gap none of them fills. The result is an evidence base instead of an opinion. The patterns that work become your structure; the gaps become your content backlog.

3. Sitemap

Now turn the research into a page structure. List every page worth having, merge the near-duplicates so two pages never fight for the same search term, then add the pages your market has missed. Group them into silos such as services, guides and case studies, give each page a short, clean URL, and settle a navigation of five to seven items. Keep it shallow, so anything a visitor cares about sits a couple of clicks from the home page. This tree is what the content briefs and the wireframes are both built from.

4. Content

A sitemap is a set of empty boxes until each one is briefed. For every page, write down its job, the search term behind it, the questions it has to answer, the proof it should carry, and the one action you want the reader to take. Rank the commercial pages first and treat the rest as a backlog you publish into over months, rather than a launch-day dump that then goes quiet. The same discipline runs through our SEO SOP pack. Those briefs are what tell the design and the build what each page has to hold.

5. Wireframes

Before a colour or a font is chosen, lay out the structure of each page type in greyscale. Most sites need only six or so templates: a home page, a service or landing page, an article, a listing, a contact page and the legal pages. Build them from one small kit of reusable blocks so every page stays consistent, give each page a single clear action, and reserve space for every image so the layout doesn’t jump around as it loads. Getting the bones right in greyscale is cheap. Changing them after the design is finished is not.

6. Branding

This stage sets a direction for how the site looks and feels, not a full identity project. Decide where you want to sit against the rivals you studied, somewhere on the line from understated to bold. Pick a restrained palette of one main colour and one accent, pair a heading typeface with a readable body one, and settle a style for photography and icons. Check each colour pairing for contrast so the text stays legible. Restraint is what reads as premium; one accent used sparingly beats a page reaching for six. This becomes the skin the wireframes wear.

7. Social

A website is only half the story. Launch day needs somewhere to point, and the site needs a steady trickle of the right visitors. Choose the one to three platforms your audience uses rather than trying to be everywhere, set the profiles up on brand, decide three to five themes you will post around, and batch a first run of posts that link back to the site. Tag those links so you can later see which platform sends people your way, and drop the ones that don’t earn their place.

8. Build spec

This is the technical blueprint a developer builds from, and your buy-or-build decision if you are doing it yourself. It names the platform and hosting, lists the page templates and reusable components, maps every integration and where a submitted form ends up, and sets the performance and SEO targets the finished site has to hit. We build on WordPress with a custom theme, the approach behind our WordPress development work, because it keeps the site fast and fully in your control. A clear spec is the difference between a fixed quote and a surprise invoice.

9. QA and launch

The last stage is the set of checks that get a site live without nasty surprises. Submit every form, click every link, push the mobile speed scores to a real standard, validate the structured data, and confirm the SSL certificate and backups are in place. Then switch the domain, remove the staging block that was keeping the site out of Google, and submit the sitemap so it starts getting indexed. This stage mirrors our website launch checklist, which you can work through on its own. Skip it and a good plan can still underdeliver on day one.

Plan it yourself, or have us produce it

The planner above runs all nine stages for your own business, free, and gives you a written plan at the end. Work through it at your own pace and you will have a genuine brief to build against.

If you would rather not run the research yourself, we produce the finished plan to the standard we would use on a paid project, ready to hand to your developer, designer and marketer. Start with the tool above, and talk to us when you want the done-for-you version.