Web Site Organization
Before your rush to put a website together, you need to organize the website on paper. There are six steps to organizing a website.
Step 1. Define your goals and objectives.
You need to determine what the goals of the website will be. What do you hope to accomplish? You also need to know how you will accomplish those goals with objectives.
Included in your objectives, you need to know what your call to action will be. Is the customer supposed to purchase a product, donate, etc.?
You also need to know your demographics. In addition to demographics, you will need to know what their needs, wants, and expectations are.
Lastly, you will want to include a Purpose Statement that includes your goals and objectives for your webpage.
Some websites refer to their Purpose Statement as a Mission Statement.
Step 2. Content.
Home Page
This should answer the questions of who the company is, product(s) being sold, testimonials or awards, and where a customer can contact you.
You should also include a privacy policy and terms of service. In addition, you will want to include a search box to make it easier for your customers
to find whatever they are looking for on your site.
Landing Pages
On these pages, you will want to use quality images, audio, and video that create interactivity between the user and the page.
Photos should be of high resolution that show off the product being sold or discussed.
You will want to keep your files and images together when building the site. You can keep a file for the entire page, or create subfolders for images, HTML files, etc.
Step 3. Structure.
After you have written down what pages you wish to create, you will want to organize a site map, which is like a flow chart.
There are a couple of ways to do that.
A linear structure is done as a sequence of steps in a specific order. A webbed structure is not in a specific order but is arranged
according to the interests of the person visiting the site. A hierarchical structure is organized into categories and subcategories.
Think of the www.elgin.edu web page. Each category is broken down into subcategories.
Step 4. Navigation.
You can use a user-based navigation system which is designed towards the visitors' needs or a user-controlled navigation system
which allows visitors to roam your site however they choose.
You will want to include a link to the home page on all your other pages. You can use a navigation bar or an off-canvas menu button (hamburger menu).
These are great choices if you want to save space on your home page by making your navigation into a hidden menu display.
Step 5. Design.
You will want to keep your website visually consistent. You should choose a color
scheme and stick to that for the home page and ever subsidiary page as well. You will want to choose colors that envoke
an emotion.
Once you have chosen the color scheme for your page, you will want to determine how you will implement that in you
CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) code. You can do an inline style which is inside the HTML tags, an internal style sheet,
which is located in the head of your HTML document, or an external style sheet, which must be linked in your HTML file.
You will also need to determine if you prefer to do a wireframe design or a layout grid design.
A wireframe is a blueprint of where items such as your navigation bar, logo, and content will be placed.
A layout grid is structured to rows and columns on the page based on the percentage of the screen.
Step 6. Test, Publish, and Maintain.
You will want to test your website several times. You can use family and friends to navigate your site and give constructive criticism
to improve the site before launching. You will want to test different screen resolutions, sizes, and different devices.
You also will need to determine how often you will update your website and the maintenance cost
(daily, monthly, yearly?) in order to keep your website current.