To Plan and Build A Site Complete Guide : You will now Plan and Build a site as Follows:
1. Discuss the purpose of the site. In other words, what do you want the site to achieve?
2. Who is the intended audience of the site? Not just the people that will access it, but also the people that you really want the site to have meaning for.
3. How does the site relate to the broader goals and communication strategies of your organizations?
4. What kinds of information circulate in the organizations in which you work, or have worked? This
could include: staff profiles; project work, recent news, events, newsletters etc. Try and make the list as long and varied as possible. Assess whether this information is relevant for the Website. Use the purpose of the site, as defined earlier, as a yardstick.
5. Look at the list and try and come up with 6-8 headings that are inclusive enough to accommodate all
the items on the list. These headings will form the entry points to information within the site, so they need to be as self- explanatory and useful as possible. They will become the main links from the home page.
Avoid acronyms, and keep the headings simple.
6. Now link the items in the first list to their relevant section heading, by drawing lines from one to the
other. Some headings may contain several items on the list, while others might contain only one item.
E.g., newsletter may be the only item that is linked up with the News section heading, while staff, Sister and Donors may all be linked to the About Us section heading.
7. We now have enough information to draw a map, which shows the basic structure of the site. This map will also show routes around the site, that is, how users can navigate their way from one page of
information to another. The different headings will become different sections of the site.
8. Draw a diagram that contains a box to represent the Home Page and boxes for each main section page, on a single sheet. Place the Home Page in the top left-hand comer. Draw arrows from the Home Page to all the pages it should link to.
9. Having established where the user can go to from the Home Page, we now need to look at links from
each of the other Main Section pages. Insert arrows to demonstrate these links on your diagram.
10. Now we can start adding documents to the main sections to see how this affects navigation of the site.
The news stories or 'documents', which make up the News Section, are all linked to from the News page, and link back to it as well. They also link back to the home page, but these are 'one-way streets'. Each Main Section page should give the user an opportunity to return Home, or visit the site's other main sections. This results in the site developing 'two-way streets' between all these 'principal' pages.
11. The site has been mapped for the user that will navigate it. Now we can turn to the Web master's plan:
the file and folder (or directory) structure of the site.
12. Consider each of the Main Section Pages in turn. Check which ones will form entry pages to other
documents, and establish which ones will contain that section's information within that single Main
Section Page. For example, the News Page will probably link to other pages with news, while the Links Page may well contain all its information on that one page. It is important to think ahead when making these decisions. Assess which sections are likely to grow into collections of pages, and which ones will remain concise and no longer than one page. Any section which looks like it will grow into several pages of documents will become a folder:
0 comments: