Website Design

1
Website Design

• SI 539
• Fall 2004
• Sandra L. Bartlett

2
What is a Website?

• Groups of related web pages
• Unified by a homepage
• Developed by groups of people
• To meet the needs of other groups of people
• Not as a technology problem (unfortunately, the
  course forces this)

3
Who Cares About Your Design?

• Users customers, sales people, managers,
  suppliers, casual web browsers, etc.
• People who hired you
• Behind the scenes geeks
• Programmers (write code to do what you want)
• System administrators (install and maintain the
  hardware and software that support the site)
• Site administrators (people who keep the site
  running after you leave)

4
Cost of Bad Design

• 1 at design time
• 10 during development
• 100 during beta testing
• 1,000 when finished
• 10,000 or more after deployment
• Actual cost of making changes
• Loss of business

5
Planning a Website

• Gather your development partners
• Fellow group members
• Site owners
• Users
• Me

6
Planning a Website (cont.)

• Analyze needs and goals
• Users
• Site owners
• Course
• You

7
Planning a Website (cont.)

• Create a site specification document
• Content experts (site owners)
• Writers (you)
• Information architects (you)
• Graphics designers (you)
• Technical experts (you and me)
• Producer who sees the project to completion (you)

8
Design! Design! Design!

• http//www.yahoo.com
• http//www.google.com
• http//www.paperweb.com.au/
• http//www.art.com
• www.artnetweb.com/index1.html
• http//www.vanderbilt.edu/create/tech/index.html
• http//www.si.umich.edu

9
More Design Issues

• Novices vs. power users
• Children vs. adults
• Handicapped users
• Screen readers vs. print and read
• Modem vs. broadband
• Occasional visitors vs. daily users

10
Behind the Scenes Problems

• Time limitations
• Budget limitations
• Management pressures
• Divergent stakeholder interests
• Site owner
• Funding entities
• Users
• etc.

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Guaranteed to cause failure

• Listen only to the site owners
• Keep development secret
• Development team decides what the users need
• Put it off to the last minute

12
Cost of Bad Design

• 1 at design time
• 10 during development
• 100 during beta testing
• 1,000 when finished
• 10,000 or more after deployment
• Actual cost of making changes
• Loss of business

13
Site Development Process

• Site Definition
• Site Planning
• Site Design
• Site Construction
• Site Marketing
• Tracking, evaluation, and maintenance