Follow step by step this tutorial How to Developing Joomla! Website with easily. One of the most important steps in building our site is the planning stage. This stage is often poorly executed because:

• we often want to get right into building our site immediately
• it starts out as a hobby, or practice site and slowly grows into our business
• we plan our site based on the extensions we want, rather than basing the extensions we want off the plan for our site

It is, however, vitally important to properly plan our site before we start building it if we ultimately want it to be successful and not simply a domain, a collection of extensions, and a template drifting lost in cyberspace.

If we are hoping to build a real business out of our site, it is especially important to plan it out properly because our site's success and failure translates directly into income or no income.

While we are planning, we are also going to put some thought into how we are going to structure our business income, look at the options available to us, and then choose one or more that are appropriate to our mission and goals.

So, in this article we aim to cover:

• why it is so important to plan
• how to write the mission statement and goals
• decide how our site will generate income
• how to pick extensions based on our goals
• what are some of the basic must have extensions for most Joomla! sites
• the goals and extensions for our sample site

Why is it so important to plan?

Planning is important firstly because it keeps us on the right path towards our goal, and secondly it helps us keep our site clean and simple and not succumb to what I call the "Frankensite" effect.

The Frankensite effect

Imagine building a house simply by finding random pieces of nice house fittings, some floor coverings that caught our eye, bathroom and kitchen fittings, doors, and door handles. All of these items picked individually without any thought for the style, size, or appearance of the other items. Then, after we have all the parts we want, finding a block of land, and assembling all the pieces randomly without any plan of what kind of house we want.

I am sure you can imagine the crazy, monstrous house that would result. To do this with a house would be unthinkable for most people.

Many people, however, build their web sites, and even their business in this way. They collect a big list of extensions they want to use and then try to work out what kind of site they can build from them. In some cases, not even that much planning is done and they just add extension after extension to the site without considering the site appearance or functionality.

This is what I like to call a Frankensite. Just like the legendary monster made by doctor Frankenstein, a Frankensite doesn't look like, nor behave like, a professional web business. Rather, it looks more like a collection of extensions stitched together by a mad scientist in a grotesque, terrifying parody of one.
Well, I am sorry to break it to those people, but they are not the first person to think that installing Community Builder, SOBI, JEvents, Groupjive, a forum component, and all 50 plus plugins for them will somehow give them a Facebook killer, nor will they be the last.

I would be confident in saying that this is one of the single biggest reasons that many CMS-based sites (not just Joomla!) fail, or only experience mediocre success. It is very easy to install Joomla!, slap on a template, and install every extension we can find. But if we wish to actually succeed and keep customers and visitors on our site, we need to build trust and provide a simple and useful service or information. Mashing extensions into a site with no planning just makes the site confusing, difficult to navigate, and ultimately unusable for most, if not all people. The end result is a lack of trust and people leaving us, never to return.

Having too many extensions also makes it very difficult to style a site properly. Especially, if those extensions already have fixed styling which we can't change (such as flash extensions) or are difficult to style (no CSS files, just elements hard coded into the HTML itself). This inability to style effectively is what gives a Frankensite their characteristic stitched together look. Different fonts, sizes, colors, lines, buttons, and styling all combine to make the site look like a monster and not a respectable business.

Ultimately, we want our web site to look as little like a Joomla! site as possible. The less it looks like a bunch of unrelated extensions patched together and the more it looks like a cohesive well designed site, the more easily our customers will come to trust us and the more successful we will be. The best way to achieve this result is through detailed planning.

Remember though that while appearances certainly aren't everything, and we need to have substance in our site to actually keep people, we get only one chance to make that critical first impression and get our visitors to take the time to inspect our site.

No one can hit a target they don't have

Besides the Frankensite effect, building a site without planning is like driving in the fog through a forest. We have no idea where we are going, and are only able to see a few feet in front of ourselves. We can't actually get anywhere, and all we can do is try to dodge problems when they appear, or fix the car if we do hit a problem. Many poorly planned web sites also end up like this. They are never able to really go forward, they merely try to avoid, and fix, the problems they come across.

This is because, if we don't plan our site carefully, we won't have any idea what it is we are actually trying to build. What service or product is it we are providing? Who are we providing it to? Why should they buy it from us and not someone else?

We can't market our site if we don't know what it is meant to be doing, and if we can't market our site, then our visitors are going to have a hard time finding us.

Also, if we have a plan with clear goals for our site, then whenever we need to make a decision we can compare any questions, decisions, or problems that arise with our goals and decide which answer moves us closer to them. This makes the whole process quicker and smoother.

With a good plan, we will also find that the development time is sped up and our site will go live faster, allowing us to bring in more customers, and thus more income.

If we have dozens of extensions, but need to put in the time to get them all working together and looking good, then it will take an exponentially longer time for each extension we add.