Planning
A website is your presence on the internet and represents you and can be seen by anybody anywhere in the world who has internet access. When thinking about getting online with your own website there are some key steps to ensure that you have the website that best meets your needs.
When starting to design a website a good starting place start is to answer the following questions:
- Who are your target audience?
- What is the purpose of your website?
- Do you have any established branding that you could use such as business cards and if so how well will this translate onto a website?
- What content do you have already and what needs to be written?
- Do you have images that you want to include?
- What kind of style to you want your site to have?
You want to design a site that peole find useful easy to use and most of all will come back to.
- Keep it simple
- Keep it relevant
- Keep it accurate and up to date.
- Keep the navigation simple and easy to use
Designing
Here are some guidelines for planning a new site or an over-haul of an existing site.
- be clear about the purpose of your website
- understand who your intended audience is
- select a relevant domain name
- design the style of your site
- prepare content for your site
- pick a hosting solution
- plan how you will maintain your website
Purpose
You should have a clear intent for your new website. It might be as simple as a site to share family photos or you may run a small business and feel that your business would benefit. The purpose of your site will help guide you on the style, domain name and content.
Audience
The audience you have in mind will affect the design of your website. The site is there to convey the information you wish to share with your target audience and you want to ensure that you capture their attention instantly. Generally when people browse websites they have a short attention span. For example:
- A business site would want to appear clear and professional
- A site to represent your personally with photos, musing and maybe a blog could be very informal.
- A local charity with disabled users will want to make sure the site is as accessible as possible to ensure all uses can benefit.
Style
The look of feel of you site is very important and should reflect the nature and intent of the site and suite the audience that you hope will use your site. It is important to keep the site easy to use but also that it looks attractive so that people will remember and want to visit your site.
If the site is for you company then you might want to consider using the branding that you have for you company already. For instance if you have designed business cards then at a most basic level use the colours and fonts that are present on your business card. If is a personal site then you might have a favourite colour or font that want the site to be themed with.
When thinking about style think about colours, fonts, spacing of paragraphs and lines, alignment, will you have menus to navigate the site. Also think about whether you have logos or branding that should be included. There are some samples that might be helpful on the general website page.A website designer will be able to help and guide you with this.
Structure
Structure is how the site is laid how, number of pages, any links within the site and how the user navigates about the site. Your designer can help you and how the is designed will depend of the content that you site will include.
Often sites include a sitemap which clearly lays out the pages within a site and their connections to each other. Designing the site map can be a very good first step to preparing the site structure. The sitemap for this site can be found here.
Content
You will need to supply the content for your site and this will help to guide the design and style of the site. The more of the content you have prepared before meeting the design the better. Include content that is relevant to the site and can be kept up to date easily. Include any images including photos or logos that you want to appear as well as where they will appear.
Maintenance
The key decision here is can you or do you want to maintain the site yourself. To have the site maintained for you is easier but of course will cost money every time you wish to make a change to your site.
One solution to enable you to maintain the site yourself is to have a site developed using a Content Management System (CMS). A CMS will include an interface to allow you to alter the content of the pages without need to edit any of the pages directly. If you site is built with a CMS ensure that you receive adequate instructions on how to use and manage the CMS. You may still assistance to add new pages to the site or re-arrange the layout and if so ensure that you have a clear understanding of how that will happen.
If you are planning to self maintain then you will need to ensure that you have full access to the hosted site at all times so that you can do the maintenance at time that suites you.
Domain Name
The domain name is your address, it is how people will find you and ideally should be as memorable as possible. It should be as representative as possible of the site for example:
- For a personal site where your name is Fred Brown the domain might be fredbrown.me.uk
- For a company site for a business called Whitton Washers might choose whittonwashes.co.uk.
Domains are registered with central organisations that ensure they are unique. They hold information about who owns each domain and guarantee that as long as you pay your annual registration fee the domain will be reserved for you. The registration fee tends to be small typically just a few pounds per year.
Hosting
Hosting is where you store the content that is pointed to by the domain. The content is stored a series of files to which the person responsible for maintenance will have access to. Along with hosting the website you will usually be offered 1 or more email addresses that match the domain of your site. There are many companies who will host your site for you and it need not be expensive. They offer different priced packages depending on your needs a site and your designer can help you select one that is right for you needs.