Planning Your Site

There's a strong temptation, once you've decided to build a website, to jump straight into a builder and start dragging things around. Resist it for thirty minutes. A little planning up front — deciding what pages you need, how they connect, and what you want each to accomplish — will save you from the far more painful experience of building a sprawling, incoherent site and then having to tear it apart and reorganize. An independent filmmaker website doesn't need to be big, but it does need to be organized around a clear structure and a clear path for the visitor, and that comes from planning, not from improvising in the builder. This chapter is a quick, practical guide to sketching your site before you build it, so that when you do open the tools (next module), you're assembling something you've already thought through.

What to plan before you build

The planning that pays off:

• Your page list. Decide the actual pages — typically a home page, a film page (or one per film), an about page, a press page, and a contact. Keep it lean; every page should earn its place.
• Your site map (how pages connect). How visitors move between pages — your navigation. A simple, obvious structure beats a clever one; people should never wonder where to go.
• The primary visitor path. The main journey you want most visitors to take — e.g., land on home → watch trailer → join email list. Design the structure to guide that path.
• Your key conversion. The single most important action (usually email signup or "watch here"), placed where visitors will hit it. Decide it now so the whole site can point toward it.
• What content you already have. Inventory your assets — trailer, stills, synopsis, bio, press kit — so you know what's ready and what you still need to create before building.

Planning that keeps your site simple and effective

The two principles that make planning worthwhile are simplicity and a clear path. On simplicity: filmmakers often over-plan, imagining a sprawling site with a dozen pages, a blog, a shop, galleries, and more — and then either never finish it or end up with a bloated site that buries its own important content. The truth is that a small, focused site does the jobs better: for most film or filmmaker sites, a handful of pages (home, film, about, press, contact) is plenty, and every additional page should have to justify itself against the risk of clutter. When in doubt, cut. A lean site is easier to build, easier to maintain, and easier for visitors to navigate, which means it does its jobs better than an ambitious one. On the clear path: your site shouldn't just present pages, it should guide visitors toward the action you want. Before you build, decide the primary journey — where you want most people to land, what you want them to see, and what you want them to do — and then structure the site to make that path obvious and easy. If your key conversion is joining the email list, then the path from "arrives on site" to "joins list" should be short and clear, with the signup visible and inviting rather than hidden three clicks deep. Planning the path now means you build a site that leads people somewhere, rather than one that just displays information and lets everyone wander off. Two practical tips. First, sketch it on paper (or a simple doc) before touching a builder — literally list your pages and draw arrows for how they connect and where the visitor path goes. This takes minutes and prevents hours of rework. Second, inventory your content early, because the most common thing that stalls a website build is discovering halfway through that you don't have a good synopsis, a decent bio, or web-ready stills — so figure out what you have and what you need to create before you start building, and gather it (much of it lives in your Toolbox already). With your pages listed, your structure mapped, your visitor path decided, your key conversion chosen, and your content inventoried, you're ready to build efficiently instead of flailing. This planning is the bridge between the "why and what" of Module 1 and the "how" of Module 2 — and it's the step most people skip, to their cost. Do it, and the actual building goes smoothly. Next module, we start building: choosing your website builder and template.