Your Site Plan

One site, written down, finished

Everything up to here was mechanism. This lesson is the decision, and the decision is the harder half.

You are going to pick one site, scope it down until it is genuinely small, build it, publish it, and stop. The stopping is not a formality. It is the part most people fail.

The plan, in four parts

Write these four things down. All four fit on one side of a page, and if they do not, the site is too big.

One sentence on who it is for. A specific person in a specific situation. "Somebody who has been given my name by a friend and is checking I am real before they call."

The sections, in order. Between three and six. If you have written eight, two of them are the same section wearing different hats.

One success test. A single checkable statement that tells you the site works. Not "it looks good." Something like: "a stranger can find my phone number within ten seconds, on a phone." You are going to test this literally, on a phone, with somebody who has not seen it.

One stop line. Written in advance, while you are still calm: the sentence that says you are finished. "When the success test passes and there are no spelling mistakes, I publish and stop."

Here is my plan.
Audience: [one sentence].
Sections in order: [list them, with what each one is for].
Tone: [two or three words].
Success test: [your one checkable statement].
Build this as a one page site. Use exactly the sections I
listed, in that order, and no others. Where I have not given
you wording, write something plain and short rather than
marketing language, and mark anything you invented so I
can replace it.

Cut it before you build it

The single best predictor of whether a personal project gets finished is how small it was when it started.

Run this before you build anything. It is uncomfortable and it works.

Here is my section list and my success test: [paste them].
Tell me which sections I could remove and still pass the
success test. Be ruthless. For each one you would cut, say
what I actually lose. Do not be encouraging.

Everything the cutting prompt removes goes on a second list, called later. Nothing on the later list gets built this week. The list exists so that good ideas have somewhere to go that is not the current build.

Before you publish

Review this page as a first time visitor who is in a hurry
and using a phone. Tell me what you think this site is for,
what you think you are meant to do next, and anything that
is unclear, missing or contradictory. Do not compliment it
and do not suggest new features.

Then do the real version. Hand your phone to somebody who has not seen it and ask them what the site is for. Ten seconds of watching a real person beats an hour of guessing.

Stopping

Your stop line is the whole point, so honour it. When the success test passes and the spelling is right, publish and close the tab.

Everything you notice afterwards goes on the later list. Revisit that list on a fixed day rather than in the moment, because just one more thing in the moment is how a two hour project becomes a fortnight and then never ships at all.

Finish this course and you have earned the Site Builder badge. The badge is a nice thing. The published address you can send to somebody is the real one.

And if you are reading this from the UK, the EEA or Switzerland, or you are on the Free or Go plan, the plan above is not wasted. It works exactly as well for Lovable, which is free to start and available to you. Take the four parts with you.