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Planning Your Web Site When Designing a Site for Yourself You have the final say over the design and content There is no cut off point as to the completion date You are able to experiment with different styles of interaction Rough edges don't really matter You may be the only person to ever be involved with the source code However… When Designing a Site for a Client: You are not in control of certain aspects of the site. (Corporate Image – Content) You are working to a deadline, after which the site will "go live" You need to get the styles of interaction, look and feel correct from the site's launch Customers don't look kindly on "experimental" features Rough edges do matter Other people may be involved with your source code To address these issues you will need: A design strategy to make sure the Web site's design is correct early on in the design process Documentation to ensure that other people will understand what you have done Procedures for testing your design to make sure it works as intended Interaction with the client and the user. (To make sure you are getting it right.) Design Process External Design The creative brief Decide on a Navigation Model Create a paper based design Create your “Wireframe” Develop you initial prototype Internal Design Directory Structure Site Map Templates External CSS The Creative Brief Specifies the overall direction of the project Gets the creative juices flowing Outlines the audience Expectations of the site The content of the site Phones 4 Me Web Site Creative brief 17/10/06 Project Summary Phones 4 Me is a popular retailer of mobile phones and contracts. The site is intended to allow customers to purchase handsets and contracts over the Web. Target Audience Although all types of customers are welcome, the company specifically wishes to target the 18 – 30 age range. 90% of the existing customers fall within this bracket and the company is widely recognised as a brand for this group. Tone The tone of the site should be youthful and dynamic with a slight professional edge in order to be in line with existing marketing strategy. Navigation Models How will the pages link together? Linear Hierarchical Hub and Spoke Full Web Linear Navigation Model. (Slide show.) Useful if you wish to control the users movement through the site e.g. Good for a tutorial or presentation Note navigation! http://www.webreference.com/html/tutorial1/ Hierarchical Navigation Model Common on the Web, with a main page and then sub pages linked off it and so on into the site www.cse.dmu.ac.uk Hub and Spoke Navigation Model User enters the central hub, the home page Any page is available from the home page Each page leads back to the home page Never more than a couple of clicks from the home page http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mjdean/notes/modules/multimedia/CSCI2608/0708/index.html Full Web Navigation Model Each page links to every other page Risk of getting lost http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page Which navigation model? No specific model works best Many sites are a mix of different models Paper based design Couldn't be more non technical Paper – Pencil "Rough out" your initial plans Start with the main pages and think about how they might look Creating Storyboards Once you have an idea of how your site will look plan out a storyboard This is a presentation of what each page will do and the type of content it will have PowerPoint is a quick and easy tool for creating story boards A story board (like a story) should have: A beginning. A middle. And an end. Sample storyboard. Wire-framing your site A Wireframe is a digital rendering of the storyboard A "bare bones" model of your site No written content No graphics Just blank pages linked to each other identifying The intention of each page The means by which the pages are navigated Sample wireframe Internal Structure of the Site How are your files to be stored? Remember - The folder is your friend Use a logical structure Use folders that DreamWeaver can recognise Templates Graphics Use Templates / External Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) Templates define layout for similar pages. CSS defines colours, fonts (plus more) for specific areas Web page (html file) Web page (html file) Web page (html file) Web page (html file) Template (dwt file) Web page (html file) External CSS Web page (html file)