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Entries in "Planning Your Website"
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June 20, 2006
Web File Organization and Naming Conventions
At home, entropy reigns supreme. My friends will attest that a visit to Heidiland—replete with obstacles ranging from art supplies to Pisa-like stacks of books—is an adventure that would be considered overly-taxing by the neat freaks of the world. My computers, however, are another story. Given that my active Web development folder has over 14,000 files within, and that this is but one of many folders on one of three computers, I've had to take a more logical approach.
April 17, 2006
Building your site: Tertiary pages—When more is more
In the Planning your Web site articles I wrote on first and secondary pages, I recommended not overwhelming the user with too many choices or too much information. That less is more approach works very well to ensure that critical information is not lost in a crowd of words, and helps us set up an easy to maneuver navigational system. But as we get deeper into specific areas of the site, our goals and strategies change. Once we have carefully guided our visitors to our third, fourth and deeper level pages, it is time to reward them with in-depth...
February 08, 2006
Building your site: Secondary pages
Now that you've created a welcoming front door, it's time to create your secondary pages. These pages can fall into two categories. On a small site made up of just a few pages, your secondary pages will hold your primary content. On a larger site, such as our Department of Cartooning site, the secondary page must both include useful content and serve as a gateway to the other pages in that section of the site. Gateway to enlightenment When I describe a page as a gateway, I mean it to be a page through which a user can find...
January 25, 2006
Building your site: The Front Page
In the last chapter of the tutorial we discussed content acquisition. Now that some time has passed, and we've gathered our content it is time to start building the page. For the purposes of this entry my focus will be to explain what content goes where. This will not be a detailed explanation of HTML and CSS. The image on the right is a screen capture of the first page of our fictional Department of Cartooning website. As was decided when building the site map, I'm using an "Advanced Template" with a horizontal menu for this site. (Template files...
Building your site: The Front Page
In the last chapter of the tutorial we discussed content acquisition. Now that some time has passed, and we've gathered our content it is time to start building the page. For the purposes of this entry my focus will be to explain what content goes where. This will not be a detailed explanation of HTML and CSS. The image on the right is a screen capture of the first page of our fictional Department of Cartooning website. As was decided when building the site map, I'm using an "Advanced Template" with a horizontal menu for this site. (Template files...
Building your site: The Front Page
In the last chapter of the tutorial we discussed content acquisition. Now that some time has passed, and we've gathered our content it is time to start building the page. For the purposes of this entry my focus will be to explain what content goes where. This will not be a detailed explanation of HTML and CSS. The image on the right is a screen capture of the first page of our fictional Department of Cartooning website. As was decided when building the site map, I'm using an "Advanced Template" with a horizontal menu for this site. (Template files...
August 25, 2005
Organizing, acquiring, and creating content for your website - Part Two
Clark Hall Now that we've reviewed and finalized our site map, it is time to start collecting and writing the content we need to build the site. Acquiring existing written content Some of the content you need probably exists already. For example we've decided to include course descriptions on our fictional cartooning site. These probably already exist in the General Bulletin, so you could just go there and copy and paste from that document. On the other hand you may find that you want to include more details than are available in the bulletin. In this case I would send...
Organizing, acquiring, and creating content for your website - Part One
Having reviewed our goals and those of our audience, we should now be at the stage where we have a list of content ideas. Some of these we've come up with on our own and some have been suggested by our prospective site visitors. If you are like me you may have these items scrawled out in no particular order on a legal pad, note cards, or the back of an unused airsickness bag. Now is the time to make sense of them. Organizing your content The first thing I try to do is arrange my items into logical...
July 28, 2005
More about your target audiences
Last week the subject of our target audiences received short shrift as I waxed forth on the subject of goals. In revisiting this subject I want to emphasize just how critical it is to find the balance between our own goals and those of the people we wish to visit the site. Sticking with the cartoon theme I've used the example of Dr. Doolittle's "Pushme-Pullyou." One head represents the person producing the web content while the other represents the site visitor. In the movie this creature provided a navigational advantage when they were on board ship as it could...
July 21, 2005
Understanding your goals and your target audience
At this point you should have a fairly clear idea of the goals for your site. But have you considered this: are your goals related to the goals of your intended audience? To examine this issue let's pretend we are building a new website for the fictitious Department of Cartooning. As we see in my own feeble attempt at cartooning, our webmaster is pondering his goals. The first one, to recruit faculty and students is a goal common to academic departments. (How we create content to support such goals will be discussed in a later post) Here our target audience...
July 01, 2005
So you want to build a website
This is the first in a series of entries on how to plan your website. Whether you are starting from scratch or rebuilding an existing site, I hope this will help you understand how with careful planning you can build a site that serves the needs of your target audience. Now that you've decided to make a site, you are probably thinking about colors, html and menus, etc. But just as one doesn't hit the ball in one's first tennis lesson, one doesn't start a website by jumping into the code. Instead, the first question you should ask yourself...
So you want to build a website
This is the first in a series of entries on how to plan your website. Whether you are starting from scratch or rebuilding an existing site, I hope this will help you understand how with careful planning you can build a site that serves the needs of your target audience. Now that you've decided to make a site, you are probably thinking about colors, html and menus, etc. But just as one doesn't hit the ball in one's first tennis lesson, one doesn't start a website by jumping into the code. Instead, the first question you should ask yourself...