• Friday January 2, 2009 - 9:04:58 am GMT
• registered : 1144407
• online : 33134
• questions/day : 5578
• Answer rate : 77.6%

Website Design

Website design must be a user-oriented collective effort. This means that, when possible, the design process must include participation of a group of representatives from the business or organization and their beneficiaries, with the common goal of obtaining maximum satisfaction among users.

Thus, the design process must mainly focus on the user and must take place in close collaboration with a representative panel of users, at a brainstorming session, for example.

The main goal of the design phase is to analyse all of the needs and then imagine the contexts for use. Analysing needs falls into two categories:

• The needs of the organisation, corresponding to a goal strategy
• The needs of the users, corresponding to a target strategy

Goal Strategy

Before starting any website project, it is necessary to go over the website's goals. For a business or organisation, this involves analysing how the website will help the organisation meet its own strategic goals.

It is a good idea to make a list of the website's goals and define the operational and quantifiable criteria that will allow the organisation to measure whether or not the desired goal was truly met.

Target Strategy

A website is generally intended for a category of users. Precisely targeting the user type in question will allow the business or organisation to establish a user profile and thus focus the content on a specific type of information.

Thus, it is necessary to think about the type of information that target users are likely to search for and try to determine their main questions and the type of responses they are expecting to receive.

This step can be done by interviewing a business's clients or an organisation's beneficiaries, or, in the case of a personal website, through conversations with the website owner's friends and family.

Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence consists of determining a website's main competitors, analysing how they serve their clientele and finding any possible weaknesses in order to offer a service that fills in the competition's gaps. This involves performing a competitive analysis, based on one business sector, that will be used to draw up a comprehensive picture of the existing offer and the needs to be satisfied, in order to establish a website that offers something more to future visitors.

Scenarios

Writing up scenarios involves a business or organization putting themselves in the user's shoes and imaging the different possible use cases for a website.

Specifications

Specifications are an all-encompassing contractual document that allows the client to specifiy his needs to the project manager (service provider). Even if a service provider is not hired to build the website, writing up even a small list of specifications in order to formalise ideas is still useful procedure for a business or organisation.

Planning

The planning step consists of:

• making a list of the people working on the website project
• dividing up the tasks according to skills
• establishing a schedule for each task
• figuring out the the cost of the project by calculating the time spent by each person and multiplying it by their hourly (or daily) cost

A website project team generally includes the following jobs (one person may have several jobs):

Feasiblity Study

When designing a website, the project must be analyzed in terms of budget and time, as well. The project must include long-term plans, i.e. the organisation must anticipate the means necessary for creating the site but also for maintaining and updating it. As such, if the website is not regularly updated, the company's brand image may suffer rather than increase in value.

During this step, the initial goals can be reviewed and prioritised in order to choose, depending on the budget and deadlines, only those that are most important.

Last update on Thursday October 16, 2008 02:43:14 PM.