Planning a new web site
When starting to make a new web site, the first thing you should do is to get some pens and paper. Web sites are built on a computer but they are planned on a desk. Young and inexperienced web design students sit down at the keyboard and start making a web site with only a vague idea in their head as to what it is going to be. Websites do not begin life on at the keyboard.
Serious web designers begin with paper and they plan before they touch a keyboard.
The bigger the web site the more time needs to be spent in planning. If you are building a web site for a client, you have to carry the client with you all through the build phase. They have to be satisfied with what you are doing. I usually create a web address called “work in progress” and customers can actually watch the web site as it is being built.
The one thing I don’t want is to spend a lot of time working on a site and for the client to come back to me and say they don’t like what I have done and they want some major changes. That wastes time and decreases my profit margin.
Stages in planning a web site
Planning and styling – working on paper - work on paper to plan your site – use storyboards – do a rough page layout - think through the look and feel and try alternative colour schemes.
Site mapping and navigation - how many pages, what is each page called, what is it about. Draw a site map (sometimes called a storyboard). Each page is a box and the links between pages are drawn as arrows. Set the title of the page and the file name. This helps when designing the navigation.
Creative design and colouring - reasons for choosing colour schemes, how many colours to use, what to use those colours for
Collecting and managing images - company logo, stock photos, product photos, pictures of staff
Preparing the text - getting draft copy from the client, desk editing text to make it suitable for the web, editing text for keyword density.
Creating a master file (sometimes called a template)
Create a master file from which all other pages in the web site will be copied. Make sure that the code, structure and layout are correct and that the style sheets are connected up. Use file save as to create each page. Make sure you use the correct format for file names. This is my protocol for file names: DO NOT put spaces into file names and use only lower case letters. Use underscores instead of spaces. These rules help to keep broken links down to a minimum. This applies both to web page filenames and to image file names.
Use FILE SAVEAS to make each new page. Check your navigational links in the browser to ensure that all the images work.
Create a project plan or check list to make sure you are completing each step of the build.
External style sheet created
- Document type is present on each page - check you have the correct DTD for the elements you are using.
- All styles are correct
- Styles are applied to appropriate elements
- Links in menu bars are checked and correct
- Alt statements set for all images
- Title tag set to generic statement - this will need to be modified for each page
- Codes has been checked for errors
- Copying (replicating) the master file to create the pages of the web site
- Testing the navigation
- Putting in the content
- Testing
Site finalisation checklist and quality control
Publication
Post-publication procedures
Testing - validation - robots txt file uploaded - favicon in place - submit site to ICRA for content rating.
Submission to search engines.