Planning, Designing, and Building a Website

1
Planning, Designing, and Building a Website

• Based on Web Style Guide, Chapter 1

2
Tasks for Planning a Site

• Formulate Your Purpose and Articulate Your Goals
• What is the primary purpose of the site?
• What do you want to accomplish with the site?
• You should match your purpose to audience needs
  and motivations. Your purpose must be realistic
  and correspond to real needs and interests of an
  audience.

3
Analyze Your Audience and Adapt to Your Audience

• To analyze your audience
• Find out demographic information. Age, gender,
  education, where they live.
• Find out subject-specific information. What do
  they know about your subject matter? Whats
  their background in relation to your topic? How
  familiar are they with it? What are their
  beliefs, attitudes, and preferences in regards to
  your sites topic? How will they use the
  information on your site?
• Find out about motivations. Why will users come
  to your site? What will they want to accomplish
  when they come to your site? What is the ideal
  user experience (from the users point of view)
  when they come to your site?
• Conduct research with actual potential users.
  The best thing you can do is talk to and
  interview your potential users. Interviews and
  focus groups are good

4
Review Other Websites

• Its important to get a sense of the genre of
  website you are creating.
• Genres are textual forms that have evolved over
  time. They are agreements between writers and
  readers, in a sense. They are ways that things
  are normally done, and they facilitate
  communication. Writers and readers can expect
  certain things in a site for a car dealer, for
  example, or a site for a university.
• Think about how you can fulfill your readers
  expectations and, at times, depart from them. Do
  what works for people, and try to improve on what
  doesnt.

5
Establish Working Relationships with Appropriate
People
6
Determine and Deal with Project Constraints

• Money.
• Time.
• Web style guides and design policies.
• Users Technology.

7
Establish a Theme and Style for Your Site - And
Draw Some Concept Sketches

• Theme The theme is the core message you want to
  communicate with your audience.
• Style Style is a general term for a wide range
  of content decisions that help you express the
  theme. They affect what you will include, and
  the tone you use to write about it.

8
Plan Content and Content Acquisition

• Text
• Graphics
• Animation
• Video
• Audio

9
Plan for Many Evaluations of the Site During the
Project

• Beginning
• Middle
• End
• Post-site launch

10
Write a Site Specification / Plan

• Brief Introduction to the Report.
• Statement of Purpose/Goals of the Web Site. What
  is the mission of the organization putting up the
  site? How will creating a site support that
  mission? What are the 2-3 most important goals
  of the site?
• Audience Analysis. Who will use the site? Who
  are the audiences for this site and how would you
  prioritize them? What do they know about the
  client already? What will their purposes be for
  using the site? What are their needs? What do
  you want the audience to think or do after having
  visited the site?
• Analysis of Similar Sites. Describe the genre
  of this kind of site? What kind of content tends
  to be included on these kinds of sites? How are
  they designed? What kinds of navigation do they
  use?

11
Site Specification / Plan

• Plans for the Site. This section should include
  the following
• An overview description of the proposed site.
  This should include a discussion of the theme and
  style of the site.
• A site map and content list of what will be
  included on the site.
• Design sketches / sample pages / templates that
  show the look of the site, including such things
  as positioning of graphic and textual elements,
  font styles, and colors. You must provide one
  sample sketch for each level of the site.
• A navigation plan showing how all the pages will
  link up (site map).
• Plans for Marketing the Site. How should the
  client market the site? Where should the URL
  appear? Where should the client make links to
  the site?
• Plans for Evaluating the Site. How will you
  evaluate the site once its done? What kinds of
  data can you use to judge the success of the site?