To Plan or Not to Plan?
People read the internet differently than they do printed material. Your web site should be an extension of your organization that examines “challenging questions about an organization, its administrative operations, the way it delivers services to its constituency, and even how it defines that constituency (Grunwald, pg.1) If you let the structure of your organization drive your web site plan your web site will be boring. There is a proper way of constructing a web site, like starting with a site specification and continuing through the steps from there. Failure to do so will result in a lackluster representation of your organization.
By establishing goals for your web site, you can expect better results. A web site is an ongoing work in progress and without proper planning of what your web site will entail can result in a flop. It is important to properly set goals for your web site since these will become the foundation of your design. Your goals should include “specific strategies around which the Web site will be designed, how long the site design, construction, and evaluation periods will be, and specific quantitative and qualitative measures of how the success of the site will be evaluated (Lynch/Horton, pg.2) If you are not aware of your audience, relaying information effectively will become a big issue. By knowing your audience, you can structure your web site with the knowledge and expectations of your viewers. Most importantly, you need to be aware that your audience may vary from novice to expert. With this in mind, it is vital to structure your web site with the correct amount of information to accommodate your audiences’ preference.
The hardest part of completing a web site is gathering content and making sure it has been constructed properly. During the construction process, it is important to repeatedly check each page for functionality and usability. It is also important to make sure that the links are working and a full test of the site is completed by several individuals outside of your project coordinators. This ensures that your site works and is free of errors. Not fully testing your sites functionality, HTML, links, and visuals aids will result in unplanned results. You should not market your site or post the URL until a thorough testing of your site has been completed. Another factor to consider is making sure your site is designed and coded in manageable code. It is critical to understand how your site was coded by the web developer or designer. Failing to do so can make it difficult in the future to rewrite code or read code for maintence purposes.
The most important thing to keep in mind after your web site is complete is tracking and maintence. Keeping an eye on who visits your web site is a key factor in developing new and editing existing content. This helps keep your web site interesting and up to date. Maintaining your site is also very important. Links on your site need to be checked periodically to ensure that they are working. Just assuming they work once does not guaranntee them to work consistently. Once you build an audience it is important to keep them interested by keeping the site tidy. Moreover, don’t forget to back up your site or archive it on a secure storage device. Not doing this could result in lose of your web site and its data. Make sure to backup or archive your pages.
Site specification is like your blueprint to your web site. Your site specification should list out everything contained within your site including an estimate of how long it shall take to complete the site, cost, and how you will measure your success. This comes in handy to keep your project focused and with in the scope of the project.
Citations:
Lynch/Horton, Web Site Design Process from the Web Style Guide. 2002
http://www.webstyleguide.com/process/index.html
Grunwald, Terry Web Site Planning 12 June 1999 http://www.techsoup.org/howto/articlepage.cfm?ArticleId=293&topicid=13
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