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Thread: HOW TO MANAGE THE PROCESS OF BUILDING A WEBSITE
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 3
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admin
Advanced Member Joined: Jun 14, 2003 Post Count: 2933 Status: Offline |
HOW TO MANAGE THE PROCESS OF BUILDING A WEBSITE INTRODUCTION Once people understand the basics of building websites they rarely (if ever) try learn a little about the process of planning and managing the creation of a website. In this article I look at some possibilities, and provide some tips on how to approach your next website project. LET�S START Ok, so you got a website job to do, either for yourself or your client. So now where do you begin? Many would jump right into the design, but that would be the wrong approach. The first thing you have to do is talk the client (that could be yourself!) and figure out a few things: What�s going to be in the website: You want specifics here; you need to get a detailed list of the major sections. For example: Say you�re building a website for a company that sells MP3 players. The first thing is to sit down with the client, and find out what sections he/she wants. She comes back to you with: �Product list� page � a list of the products they sell �Specials� page � list of the monthly specials �Contact� page � detailed contact information �About us� page � gives a profile of the company So your next step is to start laying out the pages, right? No, wrong. You need more details before you can start. For instance: how many products do they have? Will the �products� section need to contain many pages? Do they want to include photos with each page? How about e-commerce, do they need to enable online selling? The answer to these questions can greatly impact how you structure your pages and the website. - Let�s assume the clients just needs a simple list of 25 products and does not want to do any e-commerce just yet. So you�re ready now to move ahead with the design, right? Not yet! It�s now the clients turn to provide ALL the material that she wants to see in the website: the company logo, all the text (this includes both the text and the pricelist), all the images, the contact info etc � Before you actually start building, you need to find out one more thing; what aspect of the site does the client want to emphasize? You should take this one step further and ask what is the clients� goal in terms of the website. This can help you guide the client in terms of the content. In this case, you find out that the specials page is the page the client wants to push. With that answer, you now have your splash page � let me explain: HOW ABOUT A SPLASH PAGE? For some reason we web designers in the late 90�s felt that web pages needed some sort of cover page or splash page � like the cover of a book I suppose. The �cover page� typically had the companies� logo and a �enter here� button - that was in the best cases. In the worst-case scenarios, you had to watch a useless Flash �intro�. This may seem reasonable, but you have to ask yourself, why do you need a cover page? Why not just get to the website! These days� web designers have realized this, and now we see less and less useless splash pages. The point of the splash-page (I think) was to brand the website. In real-world web design, you should be branding the website on every page, so there is no need for splash-page branding. Instead of a splash page that says very little about the website, the splash page should present visitors with the �keys to the kingdom� � bring them to the core of the site right away and show them what is most important. In this case, it would be the �specials�. Yep, I would put the specials right on the first page for everyone to see. I would start with some short heading that tells the visitor what the website is about (ex: �Welcome to MP3.com, your source of MP3 players on the web!�), and then I would have the specials listed. - With all the clients junk (I mean valuable information) in hand, you can finally sit down and create your first draft of the website. I can�t tell you how many times I got burned because I didn�t asked all the questions, or waited for all the material from the client. Because of this, I had to go back and redo, remove and destroy work based on my assumptions of what the client was going to give to me � you�ll never know what they�re thinking until they hand it you! ---------------------------------------- Stefan Mischook Video Tutorial Store | Web Templates |
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preetkamal
Newbie Joined: Feb 13, 2007 Post Count: 23 Status: Offline |
though i am reading all yor posts from the past three hours and couldnt reply because all i need to say is thanks is in the most because they are very informative . and this one is very good , except that i didnt knew by now yet what splash page was . thanks |
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lm
Advanced Member Joined: Oct 27, 2004 Post Count: 2550 Status: Offline |
to preetkamal, If you have nothing more to say except thank you, please post just one post in open forum with links to threads you find the most outstanding. ---------------------------------------- My blog |
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