Knowledge Base
Lifecycle Of Building A Website
Website building is the science of figuring out what you as a site designer want the site to do and then creating a blueprint for the building process. Planning begins with developing the site's goals and collecting client opinions. The next step is to define the audience and the competition. The third step is the creative phase. The designer starts to build the site - forming a skeleton, picking the metaphors, and mapping out the navigation. The final step is the visual design. Once you have created a good site you can sell and buy websites for profit.
Planning The Website
The planning phase of site building is the foundation for web design. It is the blueprint for designing form, function, navigation, and interface. Planning means defining the site's goals. The overall objectives of a customised website is to:
- Speed up the interactive process
- Reduce human intervention to a minumum
- Save time
- Make buying and selling through the site cost-effective
The aim of the planning stage is to provide for quick application development and deployment. Doing this means organising the site - creating an efficient structure for the files and folders that make up the site. Ideally, you want to finalise all the content first.
Defining a site's goals involves two things: determining who will be involved in defining the goals and whether there is time or a need for formal definition. The scale of the website project is a major factor in deciding whether a formal process is required.
Another aspect of the planning phase is asking questions to decide on the site's mission, the short and long-term goals of the site, who the intended audience is, and why people will want to visit the site. Once the questions are agreed upon, they should be prioritised and passed on to involved personnel for conversion into goals. The hard part is to distill the final list into a master list of goals acceptable to all participants.
Define The Audience And The Competition
In this phase, the key question is: How can you design a site if you do not know who will be visiting it? Determining the target audience can pay handsome dividends. Defining the audience includes not just who the users are, but their goals and objectives as well. THe first step is to write a list of intended audiences. If the list gets too long, then divide it into categories.
In addition to defining the audience, you need to create scenarios or design test cases of customers accessing the site for various reasons and see how well the site matches their needs. Another way of testing the site design is to select a representative set of users. Write up a scenerio about each type of user to see how well the site will deliver what they are looking for.
The second part of this step is competitive analysis. The idea is to be aware of what other sits are doing. Make a list of your competitors' websites, evaluate them, and see where your site needs work. Start with evaluation criteria such as personalisation, consistency, and ease of navigation. User experience, defining the audience, creating scenarios, and evaluating the competition are of the design document.
Build Website Content
This phase pinpoints what the site will contain. The focus in this phase is on gathering the pieces for creating and organising the structure of the site. The pieces represent the content. For example, if I were building a website for a bank, the homepage would contain basic information about each department, as well as basic company information such as privacy policy, location, banking hours, and names of officers.
Here is an example list of items worth including in a site:
- Company logo
- Catalog of products with pictures
- Information about the company
- Testimonials page from loyal customers
- For for placing an online order
- Counter showing a really high number of hits the site has reached so far
To harness ideas about the prospective website, it is helpful to create a list of the content and functional requirements. Pass the list by key department heads or thorugh a committee to ensure there is support and consensus before you proceed with the actual design. Another approach is to have each department create its own list of content and present the resulting integrated list for all to approve. You now have a content inventory, which can be used to launch the actual construction phase.
When the content inventory list is final, determine the order of priority of each function or department. If the focus of the website is loans, then the loan function should be prominent. This ties into the goal of the site and the audience for which the site is being designed. After this step is completed, the designer needs to determine the feasibility of each function.
The result of this phase is a new addition to the design document, which could be called content and functional requirements. It should include a brief description of how the content inventory was gathered and finalised. This type of documentation will become useful later on when you need to maintain the website if someone other than the original web designer does the work.
Defining The Website Structure
In this phase, the focus is on creating a good site structure, exploring various metaphors to represent content items, defining thte architectural blueprints, and deciding how the user will navigate the site. Once a site structure is created, everything else should fall into place. This step ensures easy site navigation and well-laid-out pages and templates. Think of the structure as a skeleton that holds the entire site together.
Exploring metaphors as a way of trying to visualise the site's structure generates ideas and alternative ways of approaching site design. Metaphors can be organisational or visual. Organisational metaphors usually rely on the company's existing structure. Visual metaphors reply on graphic elements that fit the nature of the site.
Defining architectural blueprint involves diagrams showing how elements of the site are grouped and how they relate to one another. It is easy to understand the proposed design of the site and the order which it is being planned. The client can see it and comment on it before it is adopted as the final blueprint.
In this phase you will also define site navigation. How will visitors use the site? How will they get from one page to another? Local navigation can take a number of forms. It can be a list of topics like the ones found on Yahoo! or it can be a menu of choices. It can also be a list of related items such as loans, checking, and savings on a bank website.
Visual Design
The final phase to developing the visual design. The goal is to give visitors a mental map of the website: where they are and how to proceed. The first step is to use a layout grid to show how well the icons, buttons, banners, and other elements fit together. Like the format of a letter, a layout grid is a template that shows the focus of every page.
One way of getting started is to see how many page types can be generateed from the site structure listing. Page style and form should be consistent throughout the site. Content is the critical part a page, and that's where to start. Then add other elements like branding, navigation buttons, page titles, and headers and footers.
Another aspect of the design phase is establishing the look and feel of the site via page mock-ups. Mock-ups integrate the design sketches with the layout grids. Once completed, the visual design is also incorporated into the design document. The design document is now complete. It shows how to construct the site, add content, and revise after the site is up and running.
Website design has the main goal of attracting and retaining visitors. Personalisation is crucial: The designer should tailer web content directly to a specific user. Tracking the user's behaviour on the site will help in doing this. Software on the site can modify content to fit the needs of the particular user. With personalisation, users can get information quickly and more reliably than on traditional sites. Cookies may be the most recognisable personalisation tool. These enable a website to greet a user by name amongst a number of other clever tricks.