Who is your audience
For example, is your site intended for employees at your business, a way to get customers for your business, for students, for friends and/or family?

If you are making a site for your company, make sure the goal is specific and spell out what you want to accomplish. Especially since your boss will probably want to see quantifiable results (money or labor hours saved)
Keep it simple
It doesn't have to be a document, just a short paragraph or a few sentences if fine. If you have too many requirements in your goal, then you you will have too many things to accomplish when you start working on your site. As you site matures, your goals can grow and you can add more things later but you need to start with something that appears reachable.

2. Decide If You Will Pay For It or Do It Yourself?

Have you decided if you are going to hire someone to set up your Website or are you going to build it yourself? There are advantages and disadvantages to either way, but it will probably boil down to just two issues:

Time and Money: Which one do you have the most of.

To find out more about how to decide, go to Designing and Building Your Website.

3. Develop A Site Layout.

Planning your web site layout - paper is as good as a computer. By developing a visual outline of your site, you will be saving yourself a lot of time. It's much easier to erase a few boxes and lines than it is to delete and rebuild pages in a Website that is already under construction. By getting your concept down on paper beforehand, it will save you many many hours of work in the building phase.

Can you imagine all of the backtracking and rework that would have to be done if an owner said to a builder, "I want you to build me a house and I don't have a plan and I don't know what I want". Every time the owner would visit the site, he would see something he didn't like or didn't want and the builder would have to redo it. The project would drag on forever because for every step forward, there would be another step backwards.

With a little preplanning, your Website construction work will progress much more smoothly because you will know What you are trying to accomplish and What your final product is going to look like.

To find out more on how to plan out your website, go to Making a Site Layout.

On the next Tutorial Page I'll give you the details of how to make a Site Layout.