Planning a Web Site
Printer friendly
"Developing or Revitalizing Your
Web Site" (pdf).
The printer friendly version of planning a Web site (above) covers
all areas discussed in the planning section of this style guide.
Where do I begin?
Our goal here is to help you to know where to begin to develop
or revitalize your site. A good place to begin is by answering these
questions:
- Why do you have or want to have a Web site?
- What information will people look for on your site?
- What kind of information do you want to provide your visitors?
Whether you are creating a Web site for the first time or redeveloping,
you should meet with the key people who will be involved with final
decisions about the Web site and those who will be contributing
to the development. The purpose of this initial meeting is to consider
the answers to the above questions, to identify the phases of the
project, to establish deadlines for each phase, to designate individuals
responsible for each component of development, and to set a tentative
date for the site to go live. Planning allows you to see the big
picture of your project and what is ahead. To help you to keep track
of your progress, we included a check list in this guide.
Once you have the planning details sketched out, you can begin
the actual production of your Web site: create templates and/or
the actual pages, edit/write content, and incorporate images onto
Web pages.
The final part of your project is maintaining and updating your
site. You do not want your site to become static. Think about this:
why would someone come back to your site if it never changes? You
will need to continue to update your content and images, add more
pages, and check for broken links.
Building a Web site is a lot like juggling; many pieces of the
project are afloat at the same time. However, you do not have to
complete one piece of the Web project before moving on to the next.
Furthermore, because information on the Web becomes obsolete quickly,
you should have a strategy to develop your Web site and to keep
all the pieces moving, so that you end up with a live Web site within
a set amount of time. Otherwise, you may spend a lot of time creating
Web pages which never go live and/or information becomes lost or
obsolete.
The Internet is ever-changing and your Web site should continue
to evolve. Once you grasp this concept, you can publish a Web site
without all the pressures of making it "perfect". An imperfect
Web site is better than no Web presence at all. Many near-perfect
sites sit idle and unavailable to the public. Avoid letting your
site join those ranks by planning your Web project and adjusting
your timelines as needed. Consider going live with a smaller site
until the larger one is ready.
|
