Plan your website before you build it.

What a website plan covers

A plan answers five questions in writing: what the site must do for the business, who it is for, which pages it needs, which features those pages depend on, and what has to be true before it goes live. It does not need to be long. Two or three pages of plain notes are enough for a builder to quote from, and enough for you to check the finished site against.

The order matters. Features follow from pages, and pages follow from the job the site has to do. If you pick a booking system before deciding whether people book online at all, you may pay for something nobody uses. The five step vine above follows that order, and each step links to a guide or a tool.

Who these guides are for

The guides are written for people planning a first website, or replacing a site that no longer reflects the business: sole traders, partnerships and small limited companies in the United Kingdom. They assume no technical background. Where a legal or tax rule applies, the guide names the rule and links to the official source, such as GOV.UK, the Information Commissioner's Office or legislation.gov.uk, so you can read it yourself.

They are not legal or tax advice. If a decision carries real risk for your business, such as how you collect health information or sell to consumers online, check it with a qualified adviser.

How the free tools work

Five planning tools sit alongside the guides. One is a workbook for the plan itself; the others estimate a budget, sort features, list launch checks and spread the work between two dates. Each one runs in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to this site or stored, and each tool can save its result as a plain text file you can email to a builder or print.

The budget estimator deserves a note. It does not hold a price list. You enter your own day rate and your own hour estimates, and it does the arithmetic. That keeps the numbers honest: they are yours, and you can replace them with the figures in real quotes as they arrive.

Planning by type of business

A café, a plumber and a physiotherapist need different websites. The plans by business section walks through the pages and features to consider for each type of business, and why. For a café, opening hours, a menu and directions come first; a clinic has to think about how it handles health information sent through a form. Start with the page closest to your own business, then use the planner to write your version.

When you want help

If you would rather talk a plan through, the planning session is a paid video call that ends with a written summary of the decisions. If you already have a plan and want a site built from it, you can ask for a build quote. Both are optional. The guides and tools are complete without them, and a plan written here can go to any builder you choose.