• What is your monetary budget? If people are to be hired to work temporarily on the website, what sort of monetary limitations are there? Depending on the skills you have as the site manager or skills you have access to in your unit, you may need to hire a graphic designer to come up with logos and provide layout ideas, programmers, and instructional designers if the site has an educational focus. Do you have to purchase graphics or photos, scanners, additional software?
• What are your time limitations? This can be expressed in two ways--how soon does the site have to up and running? and how much time in your routine schedule of work can be spent on making the site and maintaining it? In my own contact with webmasters at the University of Arizona, and certainly within the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, I have found very few people that spend more than 15 percent of their time working on websites. If a site requires more than this amount of time, you need to negotiate what current responsibilities you have that can be dropped.
• What bandwidth issues do you have to deal with? Making an "internal" site that will be used by employees or a small group that has fast Internet connections is a very different situation than having to plan and create a site where one-fifth or more of the visitors are coming in on a 56K (or slower) modem.

If you are the boss of your site, these are factors you can consider. If you have been charged by your boss to create a site, it has been my experience that most bosses have not considered any of these resource limitations.

We have created here for use in our college a list of questions to think about if you are developing a new website. You can check out this document, if you wish, at cals.arizona.edu/ecat/web/planning/worksheet.html.