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

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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* Originally Presented at the Greater Southwest Houston Chamber of CommerceSmall Business Assistance Committee- Internet 101 Business Out of the Bag Series