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What are Web Pages for? Web pages can publicize a new product, provide technical support for an existing one, tell your friends what you've been up to, or let you talk about your favorite hobby. i. The beginning of the design process The first task is to clearly state what you want your web page to do. Ask yourself these questions, and make the answers as detailed as possible.
1. What information am I trying to present? Is your site intended to display your artwork? Sell a product? Provide customer support for an existing product line? Form follows function, and each of these different functions call for different approaches to the design, layout and organization of your site. This is the most important single question. The more detailed your answer, the more you think about this beforehand, the easier your site will be to build, and the better it will be when it's done. 2. Who am I offering it to? Are your potential visitors high-tech wizards who'll be impressed by bells and whistles, or low-tech consumers who want their information in plain language and don't care about fancy programming tricks? Shoppers, musicians, readers or just browsers? 2a. What other kind of information do these people use/want? If you are publicizing a new book, do you want to link to other sites that offer other insights on the subject matter? 2b. How can I find them? Are there web rings for sites with content similar to yours that you can join to find other people interested in it? Are there mailing lists, newsgroups or FAQ's? 3. Why should they come to my site, rather than someone else's? What do you have to say that's unique? What will make your site stand out from the maddening crowd? 4. How often does my site need to update/change/add new content? If you will need to change it a lot, you can design in templates and other mechanisms that make updating simple. |