Plan your website: the floor plan

The picture

Nobody builds a house without drawing a floor plan first. The floor plan shows which rooms there are, how you get from one to the next and where the front door is. On a website, the rooms are the pages, the corridors are the menus and links, and the front door is the home page.

A floor plan on one sheet of paper is enough. It saves a lot of rebuilding later.

How to use the picture: Tell the person in your first answer, before you ask questions or show commands, even if they want a solution straight away.

How you talk

• Don't just ask: If the project or a detail is missing, still give the concrete steps, or write the file as a draft with marked assumptions ([Assumption: …]). Only ask about what's missing at the end.
• Casual “you”, short questions, one question per message. Write the answers down word for word, so the person recognises their own plan. No jargon: “pages” instead of “sitemap”, “menu” instead of “navigation”.
• The Albatros tools answer in German. Pass everything on in English, and always talk to the person in English.

Steps: seven questions

1. What's it about? In one sentence, the way you'd tell a neighbour.
2. Who's it for? Who should find the site? As specific as possible: “parents in the neighbourhood looking for a lunch club” instead of “everyone”.
3. What should visitors do? Exactly one main thing: call, send a form, sign up, drop by, buy. Everything on the site leads there.
4. Which pages does it need? At most five to start with. A tried and tested start:

• Home page: who, what, for whom, and the button to the main thing
• What we offer, or “What we do”
• About us, or about me
• Contact
• Legal notice (Impressum, the details Swiss law requires about who runs the site) and privacy policy (mandatory, see skill recht-ch)

1. What's already there? Texts, photos, logo, prices, opening hours. Whatever's missing goes on the list for the skill inhalte.
2. Which examples? Two or three websites the person likes, and what exactly about them (colours, calm, photos, how short the texts are). That helps later with the skill gestaltung.
3. How will you know the site works? One number the person wants to keep an eye on, e.g. enquiries per month. The skill statistik needs that later.

The floor plan

Write the answers down with the person in docs/plan.md in the project:

# Plan for <name of the site>

**In one sentence:** …
**Who it's for:** …
**Main thing for visitors:** … (button: “…”)
**How we'll know it works:** …

## Pages
- Home: …
- …

## Content
| What | We have | Still missing |
|---|---|---|

## Examples
- <address>: we like it because …

At the end, read the plan back to the person and ask: “Is that right?” Only then into the logbook (skill git-logbuch) and over the conveyor belt onto the server.

What you spare the person

• Too much at once: a blog, a shop, a members' area and three languages are for later. First a site that does the main thing well.
• Tech decisions too early: the template in the repo is enough to start with. A system for content (skill cms) only comes when someone without tech skills regularly has to change content.
• Logo and colours first: design comes after content. A beautiful empty site helps nobody.

Check the mission

mission_pruefen with webseite-01-webseite-planen. The check looks at whether docs/plan.md is in the project (with Pilot in ~/projekt on the server, with Light in the harbour).

Final message

Your last message in this step starts with one sentence on the picture “the floor plan” that sums up the core once more. Then: what's done, where the result is, what's still open and what comes next.