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Planning a Website Design
The Denver web design company I work for, Fusionbox, almost
always has clients who call with rush jobs. Sometimes we miss
out on jobs because we insist that the project cannot be done
correctly within a certain timeline. What we have found is
you can do it quickly, or you can do it right.
Seventy-five percent of a successful project is planning.
That means beginning with measurable goals and objectives.
Your goals and objectives should always tie back into your
company's mission. So, if your company's mission is to be
the market leader in widgets, your site's purpose should be
to do that. It's also important to set measurable goals. This
will prove that investing in your web site, pays off. Plus,
it'll make you look good to your boss.
Once the goals are set, your planning is still far from done.
You'll want to examine your target audience or audiences and
get in their heads. This means finding out who they are and
why they are on your site. Then, you'll need to make sure
you are fulfilling their needs. Identify what actions each
target audience will take on the site. If it's someone purchasing
a widget, make widgets easily available from the homepage.
Research show that people who buy on the web want to see products
right away and they want to see images and prices. Put your
widgets on your homepage with a small image, title, description,
price (users hate to drill down to get pricing), and a "Buy
Now" link.
The next step is to determine the specifications of your
functionality. It sounds scary, but it's not. Most developers
can work with a list of statements like, "I want a user to
be able to rate products on a scale of one through five."
Write down everything you want the site to do and even include
what you might want it to do. For example, "An administrator
should be able to log into a content management area and add
a press release." You get the idea. Along with your specs,
you'll need to include a database discovery. This means determining
all the possible fields for everything that might be stored
and served in a database. For example, a product might have
an image, a title, a description, a price, a product number,
etc.
After you have determined your information architecture,
it's time to create wireframes. Wireframes are like a blueprint
of your web site. You'll want to identify all of the content
that will be represented on each page including navigation,
logos, images, and content. This is a very important step
because it takes all the guess work out for the designer,
and you can do a usability gut check on your key user paths
and the flow of the site itself. You can even build a test
site based on the wireframes and run a usability test.
The next step is to get your content together. Start with
a content strategy. What are you trying to accomplish with
your content? Don't forget to include a search engine strategy
that defines what your key words are and how you will leverage
them in your content. Is all of your content working toward
your goals and objectives? Too often I see meaningless stock
images like the ubiquitous handshake. Web users are jaded
and images like these just distract the user from their mission.
Do yourself and your users a favor and leave it out. Instead,
use images that are meaningful and I'm not talking about the
butterfly that signifies growth.
Only once all of the above steps are taken should you even
start to think about design. So many web design companies
lead with design. Then the client ends up with a site that
may be gorgeous, but doesn't support goals and objectives.
It is also of the utmost importance to design around content
rather than creating a design and then stuffing the content
into it. Your design should support your brand and serve as
the wrapping paper to the gift. And again, make sure the design
supports those key user paths; the first question your web
designer should ask you is, "What's the first thing you want
users to do when they come to your site. Don't forget to integrate
the look and feel of your site with your offline materials--
if you don't, you'll just end up diluting your brand and your
marketing efforts.
Your planning is still not done. The last bit is to plan
the actual work--who is going to do what when. Who needs to
give approval for what when. Throw in some milestones, stakeholders,
and deliverables and you're done. In other words create a
project plan. And by all means, plan the launch of the site.
Make it deliberate, not an incomplete, rushed event because
someone has it in their head that this just must be done before
the end of the year, or else Create some buzz and PR for the
launch of your new gorgeous and effective web site. Remember,
you only have one chance to gain or lose users; if a new user
comes to the site and does not see what their looking for,
they're gone, forever, and you've just lost a possible new
lifetime customer.
By planning, and doing it right instead of quickly, you'll
have an end result that is not only effective but also matches
everyone's expectations-- your boss, your sales team, your
marketing people, and most importantly your users and your
bottom line.
About the Author
Ivy Hastings is a Project Manager for the Denver web design
company, Fusionbox.
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