Viperfish Media is the home of freelance Joomla designer and Joomla developer, John Pitchers. Based in Perth, Western Australia, John specialises in all aspects of Joomla website development.

If you can't see the reason for your site to exist, I can be positive that your visitor surely won't know what you're all about either. Is your site there to get them to make a purchase on impulse? Is it there to make them download your special solution? Is it there to make them visit your physical store or shop? Perhaps the reason for your sites existence is a combination of these. Don't be satisfied with the reason: "It is to inform my customers.". We live in an age where there is 'too much information'. Your job is not to inform but to sell. It's nice to build a descriptive website.. You'd be saving a lot of money you'd otherwise have to spend in producing paper or sign advertisements, which have a tendency to go out of date as soon as you print them. Be aware that your site can do much more than simply 'inform'.

You should be able to define the objective of your website to cause an action by your visit, whether it be to buy your stuff, download your creations, make enquiries or leave contact details. Be clear from your point of contact (your front page, really) what your objective is.

After you know what your goals are, it's about time to lay out every single page before you do anything. It's not a secret, but some of the most effective techniques are the simplest. You've probably done this at one point in your life (I suspect, most likely in lower high-school years when one learns about distributing information and planning:
Violently seize a stack of A4, and start putting them down on a board or even better your floor. Imagine that each bit of violently seized paper represents a webpage. Notate on each page your idea of its content, graphics, layout, and most importantly the goals you want to achieve with that page.

Be strict with your goals or objectives. It is not OK to say that your goal is to 'describe the products'. It should outline what you want your visitor to think. Is your goal to make your visitor move to the more detailed product description, or perhaps to get them thinking about your order form? Maybe you want your visitors ultimately to fill out a poll or some similar survey. I've found that doing this helps one to be disciplined in creating a site that is designed to evoke actions, rather than purely transmit information.

Each of your pages ought to answer these questions:

One principle I learned to apply fairly early in the planning stage is to see how many clicks it takes for a visitor to move to my main focus or objective of the site. It doesn't matter where the 'index' or 'homepage' is; it shouldn't take more than three easy clicks for a visitor to reach that goal. For example, if visitors come to your site through a referral (from another site or a search engine), they must be able to see your navigation bar and move straight to the categories they're interested in. The three-clicks rule won't always be possible, but if it's taking well more than four page-changes or clicks to get somewhere, it's a good idea to reconsider how your pages are organised.

If you can do this before you build your pages, it will help you to greatly shorten the time needed to develop the site, and will definitely help you to stay focused on making your website action/objective oriented.