Have you ever seen an job advertisement that required “attention to detail?” Well, that’s website creation. It’s not a job for the easily distracted, or “skimmers” as opposed to readers, or someone with no design sense, or for people with zero technical skills. Creating a website is, as they say, a mixture of art and science. Some people skills wouldn’t hurt either.
When we at webclearly are invited to create a site, the beginning steps involve listening to, and interpreting, and understanding the client’s needs. An ability to cut through the jargon and explain technical details to someone who may know little to nothing about website creation is also helpful.
After we agree on the purpose of the site, and determine the intended audience, we talk about content. Content leads to information architecture which leads to site navigation. The customer usually offers some broad content topics, and then we go a little deeper, looking for patterns and similarities. One way to approach the content issue is to write down major and minor content highlights on index cards. The sorting of the cards can be a great help in figuring out the site’s taxonomy. This taxonomy, or arrangement, of the content into a series of parent-child relationships, leads to a site navigation scheme.
With a good understanding of the navigation, we can begin making suggestions for a site design. This can, and often does, begin with a pencil on paper sketch. Making both us and the customer happy involves an iterative process that can go from the back-of-a-napkin through computer-based sketches to roughing out a basic HTML template. There is usually a lot of reviewing and adjusting, reviewing and adjusting going on in this stage.
When the design has been fleshed out, the coding begins. This is where the “attention to detail” mentioned earlier comes in handy. Computers are good for a great many things, but accepting coding errors is not one of them. It’s a matter of code, check, see a problem, re-code, check, see a different problem. And so on. With several browsers (and their attendant finickiness) and now myriad devices available – from a three inch phone to twenty-seven inch monitors – waiting to show the site, it can be a painstaking process making a website look good in all environments.
But, finally, when both we and the customer are happy with the site, the files are uploaded. The brand new creation joins the millions of other sites out on the web.
There’s more to making a successful site than what I’ve listed here: search engine optimization, making the pages accessible for people with disabilities (what does your site sound like?), programming necessary to make forms work, etc., but we’ll discuss all that, and more, in future entries.
September 14, 2011 at 3:54 pm
Great synopsis of why content management systems (CMS) where you “type your text in this box” and “put a picture in this box” and voila “you have a website” just does not sustain beyond a one or two page site. Besides being boringly the same in their general appearance, CMS do nothing to help your content flow smoothly or to encourage users to quickly accomplish what they came to do.
As much as some companies promise that “you don’t need to know HTML to create a Website”, they are sadly mistaken. Websites, even those of one or two pages, require serious thinking and planning if you want your audience to discover you and successfully use your services.
Your homepage is the front door to your business or organization. Any subsequent pages expand on what you offer and move visitors along to — hopefully — pleasant, positive interaction. It’s the details that matter and paying attention to them yields substantial return on your investment in your Website.