A website/online business, like any other traditional business, is a lot about planning. It cannot be treated with contempt and decisions taken ad-hoc. Planning does not necessarily mean having a board of directors getting together to decide how the site needs to be run. It means deciding on your objectives, charting out how you want to achieve the same and doing course corrections at the right time.

For example how many webmasters plan their hosting needs or the marketing budget before hand. Correspondingly, even the smallest traditional business would have their marketing budget approved, finalise the intranet strategy, estimate the growth of their business and workforce etc. We cannot stress enough how the same is important to an online business too.

Take the case of planning your hosting needs. While a site starts, you need to ensure that you plan the hosting requirements for at least the next 6 months. Otherwise, suddenly one fine morning you may realise that you need to move into a dedicated server and are suddenly in the red. If this activity could be planned (which is not very difficult), then you could have set aside an amount every month especially for this purpose.

Planning is not that difficult if done regularly and religiously. If your’s is a small one man organisation, then it may be enough to jot down your musings in a notebook with the risks and issues you foresee. Add to it how you would want to resolve them and your plan for the future is ready. In our example of hosting, it would be not very difficult to calculate our hosting needs 6 months from now. Based on the marketing effort and the demand for the site/product, it should be reasonably easy to estimate the hosting needs.

The point here is, if planning for future is not going to be as difficult as it is made out to be, then why not do it? Why not resolve some problems before they become problems? Write your comments about what you think in the comments section. We would be glad to know your view point.