Beginning the Design Process
With any visual project, whether it is the blue print for a house, an oil
painting, a photograph, the prototype for a car, or a Web site, planning
is very important. Certainly, planning one aspect or portion
of a project is not as involved as the planning for the entire package.
Therefore, planning one page does not take as much planning as that of
an entire site.
Step 1:
What is the goal or purpose
of
your site? Why are you creating the page and what are you trying
to communicate? Entertain? Inform? Provide a service?
Attract customers? Give product information? Does your (intended)
design support these goals?
Step 2:
Who is your audience? Realize, of course, that, being
on the Web, the whole world is potentially the audience. However,
you should have a target audience in mind. How can you tailor
your page to appeal to the audience? This should include loading
times, graphics, verbiage, colors, etc.
Step 3:
How many pages will you need? (Site size. Not
"memory space size", but "page number size".) What sort of structure
(draw a navigation map) would you like the site to have? How would
you like visitors to go through the site ~ in a particular direction or
in any direction?
Step 4:
Sketch your design ideas on paper, including your intended
navigation map (how everything is linked). Remember, this is only
a sketch. You are not permanently bound to this format. You
may decide later that the flow or design doesn't work the way you intended
it to. At that point, by all means, change it.
Your overall site can be "linear",
"hierarchical", "narrow", "deep", or "webbed" in layout. Linear is
similar to a book, where the pages must be read in order to be understood.
In a hierarchical layout is like a tree; basic information is explained
further on linked pages. Sites that have no set structure are called
"webbed". This is especially good for sites in which page order does
not matter. Avoid sites that are too "narrow" or too "deep".
In a narrow page the home page serves as an index and all pages branch
from their, but in order to see another page, you must first return to
the home page. Deep sites have pages buried beneath other pages that
might have little or no content that the viewer is interested in.
Step 5:
Devise a simple, consistent naming system
for the Web pages, images and other related files. When the time
comes to actually put these on files, remember to follow the rules for
Web page files, folders, images, and the such. For consistency, always
name the home or main page as "index". (More on this later.)
Additional Site Planning Tips:
What to
Consider Before Building (or Rebuilding) a Site
Site
Planning Basics
Web Sense
Top
10 do's and don'ts
Yale Design Tips
Complete Assignment #5 ~ Planning a Site
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