I’m going to take you through the design of a small web site in 6 articles. I’ll start with an overview of the process.
Why is the word ’small’ in the title? Because that’s the kind of web sites I have experience with. My sites usually have between 5 – 25 pages. I don’t have to manage a team, at most I have one other coder or graphic designer working with me. So, read the following information with that in mind.
Here are the stages I go through in a web design project. I’ll go into more detail on each in the articles to come:
Stage 1: Organization
Figuring out what goes on the site, what the site is supposed to accomplish and planning Search Engine Optimization.
Stage 2: Layout
Actually figuring out the layout of each type of page with attention paid to site branding and navigation.
Stage 3: Coding
Creating the templates, includes, and pages of the site, adding in the outside programs involved like forums or shopping carts and putting the content on the pages or in the databases.
Stage 4: Testing
Trying the pages in the problem browsers (yes, this means IE on Windows). checking the links, and spell checking, basically making sure the site works.
Stage 5: Launch
Launching the site and submitting it to search engines.
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Each stage isn’t completely distinct from the others. For instance, I do a fair bit of testing in the coding stage, but I still need a testing stage to make sure I’ve hit everything. Each stage also builds on the ones before it. This means that Stage 1 is the most important stage and it’s usually the one that’s skipped or skimped on the most often.
I look at the whole process as building a pyramid. To create a good, solid web site, the whole process should look like this:
Not like this:
Where each layer represents the time and effort put into that stage.
The benefit of doing it the first, stable way, is that all the effort put into the organization stage pays off in easier, quicker layout, coding, etc stages. And, errors are caught early. Even though I do a testing stage near the end, I don’t expect to catch any major, site altering problems at that point.
Next article: looking at the Organization Stage more closely.
