Website Pre-Planning Steps
Want to develop a Web site? Before you start, make sure you consider your audience, the site’s purpose, how you will develop your content, and you will organize your site to make it easy to use for your audience.
Audience
Building a successful Web site involves defining your audience. This is an important first step in the planning process. Your site’s audience is a group of people who are anticipated to visit the site in order to achieve objectives, solve problems or get answers. The following questions will help you to define your target audience:
- What is the purpose and goal of the site?
- What do my visitors want to know, what are they looking for?
- What benefits are my visitors looking for?
- What do my visitors want to do?
- How do my visitors to want feel?
Think about the content you offer and who is most likely to need/use it, and write down the characteristics of these users in terms common to your operations. The resulting list of audience profiles may be quite diverse and require you to consolidate users into groupings with similar characteristics. Also, you need to consider that these groups may need to be consolidated in relation to their objectives at the site, thinking in terms of the content they want and how you might organize it. This process works “hand in glove” with the process of Content Assessment and Organization.
Note: if it is determined that an individual will need content offered by your organization on a frequently recurring basis, you may want to consider making a portal application to facilitate this need.
Remember, each group comes to your site with unique expectations. Consider the following characteristics for each target audience group:
- Audience Characteristics (profession, age, gender, needs, etc.)
- Information Preferences (what information the users want first, second, etc.)
- Platform Specifications (hardware, browser, screen resolution, modem speed, etc.)
- Range of Abilities (vision, hearing, web experience, etc.)
- Environmental Challenges (poor lighting, noise, etc.)
Using the characteristics of your target audience groups you can develop a Web site that will effectively deliver desired content to the intended audiences.
Purpose
The first step to producing an effective Web site is to define the purpose. Your purpose should be a focused vision of what you want your Web site and users to accomplish. You should define a purpose statement that will guide the development team through defining the audience, developing the strategy, and creating the content of the site. The following questions will help you determine the site’s purpose:
- What is the mission or purpose of the organization or service represented by the Web site?
- What are the short and long-term goals of the site?
Defining a purpose statement that looks toward the future will allow you to accommodate for growth, change more effectively and establish a well-documented idea of what you want to do now and later.
After you define your purpose statement, develop measurable objectives to help track progress and determine the success of the site. Ask the following questions to help determine measurable objectives:
- How will I know (quantitatively) if the site is successful?
- What are the consequences if the site is not successful?
Clearly defined measurable objectives will help you determine what is most important to your users and focus development efforts accordingly.
Content
The objectives of content assessment and organization are to gather a list of the necessary content and to organize that content relative to your audience’s needs. This process works “hand in glove” with the process of defining your Audience. Both these processes require that you have defined the Purpose of your Web site.
Create a list of all the information sources, services, processes, and other content you offer (or plan to offer) that can be made available through the Web. Eliminate items that don’t directly advance the purpose of your site or may not fulfill audience objectives.
Note: at this time it may be a good opportunity to enlist a focus group of your audience to help define and describe your offerings.
Assess your service offerings by mapping them to the audience based on their needs.
Next, categorize the items in your content inventory according to both user needs and the purpose of your site.
For example, if you have content that concerns the graduation process and part of your purpose is to offer that content to your users, then graduation may be a likely category. Continue to group all of your content into their respective categories.
After all the content is categorized, organize the content within each category by its relative importance to users. Finally, name each category with a concise and descriptive title. These will become your main “category” links for your Web site.
By completing this process you have collected content that satisfies the needs of your target audience, categorized your content into groups that form the foundation for your site structure, and prioritized the relative importance of the content in each category.
Developing Your Website
Does your site help your audience find the information they’re looking for? Learn how to improve the usability of your site with proper planning, intuitive site design, and effective navigation.
Storyboarding
Storyboarding is the process of developing and diagramming a site structure that best matches your users needs. Storyboarding involves recording the description, purpose, and title of the every page in your site and then linking these pages together to create a visual development model. This model diagrams how users will navigate to internal and external pages.
A storyboard allows you to see how your site navigation will work before production begins. This not only saves time and money, but also facilitates usability testing of site navigation and structure. The ultimate objective of storyboarding is to organize a site structure in a way that effectively guides users to the information they require and helps them accomplish their goals.
Typically, you start storyboarding by organizing the content of your site. After you have created a list of the pages in your site and how they are organized, then start developing the design structure. Web page organization can be approached through three different design structures: linear layout and hierarchical layout, or a combination of the two.
- Linear layout is appropriate when you want the user to visit each page sequentially without skipping around. Computer based training, procedural task instructions, or a slide show are typical examples.
- Hierarchical layout is the most common way to structure your web documents. This layout usually begins with a home page and has many links that lead to other pages; these pages also have many links that lead to other pages. There is no limit to how many Web pages you can have, however, you should limit your site to three or four levels of linked pages.
- Extensive web sites may contain a combination of linear and hierarchical layouts.
Starting with the home page, organize the pages that link from the home page; then organize the pages that link from these pages. Continue this process until you have included all of the pages in your site. The resulting diagram should resemble a pyramidal structure of pages linked together by lines.
Now that you have finished your storyboarding diagram, thoroughly test the effectiveness of your site structure and navigation. Remember, you are testing from your users’ perspective and each page should include a descriptive title, the purpose of the page, and a description of the content. Once you are satisfied with how your site is organized you should begin wire framing.
Wire Frames
Wire frames allow you to test your site architecture, content, and navigation schemes before you invest time and resources into developing the site. Wire frames are basic HTML pages that focus on the functionality of the site navigation separate from visual elements. Wire frames allow you to test different site navigation schemes in order to determine the most effective site structure. Wire frames also save development time and resources by quickly testing and evaluating Web site functionality early in the design process.
Wire frames should be basic HTML pages that only contain navigation schemes and containers for content. They are simple models used for testing. After you have developed the wire frame pages for your Web site, begin testing the site navigation and layout by organizing and linking pages together. The objective is to develop the most effective site architecture, navigation scheme, and usability design for your users.
Once you are satisfied with the functionality of your wire frame, use it as a visual model to construct the rest of your Web site.