Web page construction

Set Your Goals

What do you want people to be able to accomplish? Are your readers looking for specific information on how to do something? Are they going to read through each page in turn, going on only when they're done with the page they're on? Are they just going to start at your home page and wander aimlessly around, exploring your "world" until they get bored and go somewhere else?

• Come up with a list of several goals that your readers might have for your Web pages
  • The clearer your goals, the better.
• For a personal or special-interest presentation, you may have only a single goal: to allow your reader to browse and explore the information you've provided. Coming up with goals for your Web documents prepares you to design, organize, and write your Web pages specifically to reach those goals. Goals also help you resist the urge to obscure your content with extra information. [Top]
• Break up your content into main topics
  • With your goals in mind, now try to organize your content into main topics or sections, chunking related information together under a single topic. Sometimes the goals and your list of topics will be closely related. [Top]
  • You don't have to be exact at this point in development. Your goal here is just to try to come up with an idea of what, specifically, you'll be describing in your Web pages. You can organize things better later, as you write the actual pages.
• Storyboarding your web presentation
  • The next step in planning your Web presentation is to figure out what content goes on what page and to come up with some simple links for navigation between those pages. One way to do this is through a process called storyboarding. [Top]
  • Storyboarding a presentation is a concept borrowed from filmmaking in which each scene and each individual camera shot is sketched and roughed out in the order in which it occurs in the movie. Storyboarding provides an overall structure and plan to the film that allows the director and his staff to have a distinct idea of where each individual shot fits into the overall movie. [Top]
  • The storyboard provides an overall rough outline of what the presentation will look like when it's done, including which topics go on which pages, the primary links, maybe even some conceptual idea of what sort of graphics you'll be using and where they will go. You can develop each page without trying to remember exactly where that page fits into the overall presentation and its often complex relationships to other pages. [Top]
• Design, write, and format the documents
  • You are now ready to turn the storyboard pages into separate documents. If you are basing a Web site on existing documents, or a mixture of existing documents and newly created ones, assemble all your sources and plan a hierarchy that reflects how they relate to each other. [Top]
• Assemble the publication by incorporating hyperlinks
  • Think carefully about how you want your documents to link to each other. If you did a good job in the storyboarding step, these links will already be identified. However, this is likely the part of Web design you are least familiar with so it is good practice to reconsider the linking process. Sequential linking is often a good place to start, but don't overlook the potential of cross-linking. You can link to specific parts of documents too. [Top]
• Promote the web site to the audience.
• Maintain the site with regular updates
  • Try to plan for potential future growth. The Web is not a static medium. An orphaned site quickly becomes stale and out of date. Think about what areas of the site might end up being expanded upon or replaced. If you anticipate future changes, such as updated statistics or newer publications, they'll be much easier to implement when the time comes.

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