Plan a website before Development

I guess about a year ago I took over the site kwokwingchun.com and moved it to www.kwokwingchun.co.uk. I had wrote some of the articles for the original site when it launched but did not know anything about web design back then. A few years later and hours and hours of re-factoring I'm getting closer to the site I want. I can't help but think if only I knew everything I know now back then. But I guess that's the case with most things in life. The site is about Wing Chun a martial art and it is becoming very popular its just reached the 10,000 hits a month mark (which i think is good for my target area - second highest alexa rank for a wing chun site).

But If I got to start from scratch it would be great. On my next big web venture before i write a line of code I want to plan:

- The navigation structure (how pages link to eachother via what urls)
- The content (how to cover all the topics logically)
- An SEO friendly design that has tags from H1 -> H6
- JavaScript plugins to each page for non important content that make it easy to update all pages (centerally held announcements)
- Analitics - set targets and set up ways to monitor conversions and traffic flow
- Viral marketing strategy
- Then the design
- Then the content

I will also make sure I am using a robots.txt file from the start and an XML site map and search engine WML plugin - then I would like to make sure the images have logical SEO type names - alt tags - titles - custom tool tips. As I write the pages I want SEO all the way down the content. I want fast loads from the start this means compressing javascript and css but keeping backups of the original (separate) scripts. compressing images to the exact size and making sure the height and width are specified in the code. I would also like make sur i dont commit accessibility crimes. I would want a good blog and RSS and favicon linked in from the start.

Then It would get submission and be awesome.

If you try and do some of this after you end up having to do redirects robot excludes rewriting css all the time - losing images and re-uploading them having to compress later and it makes far more work and is soul destroying.