Planning Your Website
Define the Purpose of the Site
Start by ranking the following items:
- To gain a favorable impression of the company or organization.
- To develop a qualified list of prospects
- To sell products directly taking credit card information over the Internet
- To encourage potential customers to contact us by phone or mail to consummate a sale.
- To make available product information and price lists to distributors.
- To make available product information and price lists to customers.
- To strengthen brand identification.
Site Organization
Typical Site Layout
Label, add or cross out boxes as needed
Decide on the number of pages you think you will need.
Decide on a Domain Name
- When Possible Use Organization’s Name
- Check Availability of Domain Name
- If .com is available, register as soon as possible. With registration available under $9 a domain do it ASAP
- If it is not available, look for alternatives that include
your organization name such as:
- including your city or state,
- alternatives such the newer .biz and .info extensions
Style Guidance
List at least 3 sites you like and explain why:
Do the same with 3 sites you dislike:
Determine what your likes and dislikes have in common.
Establish Your Site Identity
- Page Headers
- Organization Logo incorporated in the header graphic promotes site identity and reinforces branding
- Look at the organization’s letterhead, brochures, catalog, etc. to produce a site that is in sync with the organization’s identity.
- Photo or drawing of product
- Typeface preference
- Preferred colors in palette ( pantone or samples should be converted to hex or rgb)
- Other ideas?
- Color and Accents
- Generally, a white background and black text is best for reRehabilitation Act of 1973bility.
- Accents in colors to co-ordinate with your organization’s logo reinforce identify and branding.
- Graphics should compliment the organization’s business but not be so intrusive as to detract from your message.
Site Navigation
- Standard navigation consists of:
- Navigation Bar with a brief word or two indicating each page or, in larger sites to each section of the website.
- Shouldl appear on every page.
- The type, style and position of this navigation bar is determined based on your site’s individual design.
- Limit this Navigation Bar to a maximum of eight (8) selections.
- Site map from home page with links to every page in the system to enable Web search engines to "spider" and index content on all page.
Frame Based Sites
- Are not recommend in most cases for the following reasons:
- They cannot be bookmarked easily
- They may have problems printing properly,
- Scrollbars and detract from the “look” of the site.
- The interfere with accessibility and present usability issues especially in older browsers.
- When to use Frames:
- To display large databases of information,
- Purposely hide URLs of content pages when you wish to prevent book marking of a particular page or section.
Basic Page Elements
- Important items which should appear on every webpage on your site.
- Use the <title> tag to display a short unique descriptive title.
- Consistent use of your header graphic on all pages.
- Place a title that will display on the page using an <hx> tag
- Use the same fonts throughout the site.
- Consistent navigation (generally at the top or left is where visitors expect to see site navigation)
- Optional:
- E-mail response link (Make sure this link is an email address that gets monitored but note that this account may experience an increase in spam as a result of being listed on your site.)
Legal Matters
Copyright - Copyright © and trademark notice should
appear at the bottom of every page.
Registered trademarks should have their ®.
Privacy Policy -
Every site with very few exceptions should have a Privacy Policy.
If you collect any data that might be linked to an individual you must
provide a privacy policy. This includes:
- Guest books
- Contact forms
- Registration
Accessibility
- Decide what level of accessibility and compatibility your website will require.
- § 508 of the American’s with Disabilities Act if you plan to do business with federal or state agencies
- Web Accessibility Initiative Level A, AA or AAA
- For most sites Level A and §508 will be sufficient to make their site useable by most people with or without disabilities.
Graphics
- It is best to use original graphics created just for you site this prevents
several problems:
- Clipart can give your site a ‘cookie cutter’ or an amateur look when visitors recognize the graphic from other sites or as included with MS Office.
- Copyright violation-under current law the person who creates any graphic, text or code owns the copyright even if they have not registered it with the Office of Copyright.
- Your graphics do not have to be complex.
- Simple text effects are frequently one of the best ways of adding graphics to your site.
- Photos
- Like with graphics, original images are best.
- Take your pictures with a high quality digital camera or scan them from a high quality photo print.
- Then optimize them for the web.
- Few will wait 10 or even 2 minutes for your photo to download.
- If you need a higher resolution or larger size for distribution use a thumbnail with a link and file size to the larger image.
- Stock Photos
- Sometimes you don’t have or can’t get the photo you need.
- Where can you get high quality stock photos without violating
copyright?
- Photodisc (http://www.photodisc.com)
- Corel (http://commerce.corel.com)
- PictureQuest (http://www.picturequest.com)
Multimedia
- Evaluate why multimedia on the website.
- Go back to the reason for the site
- When appropriate use:
- Sound, MP3, MIDI musical background or streaming Real Audio for music or voice.
- Animated GIF images
- FLASH
- Video clips
Forms
- What is the purpose of your form?
- To contact the site owner/administrator/sales;
- A guestbook for visitors to record comments;
- Request for product or other information;
- Survey of customer preferences;
- Other:
Hosting
Set Target Dates For
- Contract for Website
- If site is currently hosted, FTP userid & password to connect to site.
- Delivery of organization’s logos, site content (text, databases, etc.), images
- Delivery of preliminary design concept
- Approval of design concept
- Site delivery
- Final Payment
- Monitoring & Maintenance
- Decide who will be responsible for monitoring site statistics.
- All good hosts provide site traffic analysis tools.
- Most common ones are WebTrends and LiveStats.
- Decide how frequently the site will need to be updated.
- Decide who will be responsible for updating the website.
* Originally Presented at the Greater Southwest Houston Chamber of Commerce Small Business Assistance Committee- Internet 101 Business Out of the Bag Series