My father owns a contracting company that builds and remodels hospitals. He always talks about master planning and I’ve always thought it was just some fancy word for drawing blueprints, or some diabolical system for ensuring that a hospital has to use my dad’s firm in the future to expand. Well, it turns out master planning is actually key to ensuring that a facility can grow beyond its current design without major reconstruction of the current structure. Brilliant.

Having been a part of so many site redesigns over the years I realized how critical master planning was to a website’s growth. The devil is in the details. When planning a site redesign it’s critical that certain items are looked at with an eye to the future. Site structure, section themeing, directory structure, page naming, server platform, blog implementation, internal linking, shopping cart implementation, and external linking campaigns all need to be carefully planned and executed. If any one of these is overlooked it could cause major headaches in the future. A site redesign with no consideration for the external links to a site could see a drastic loss of position in the search engines.