1. Planning

A site has to be well-planned. If a site appears to be thrown together, then  most likely it was. Users can tell. First, prepare a mission statement. It doesn’t have to be long. A sentence or two should be plenty. In that mission statement, try to summarize exactly what you are trying to accomplish with the site. Once you’ve done that, the rest of the planning will come easier. The rest of the planning will simply become a means toward arriving at your mission statement. If you begin to lose sight of your mission statement, then write it on the top of all your outlines. Or better yet, use your mission statement as the title of your template pages.

Now to the hard-core planning. We’ve found the best way to be with a notepad and a pen (or a pencil with a good eraser). First, lay out a site map in a flow chart style. Stick to that flow chart religiously. Once you deviate from your planned site map,you create almost twice the workload for yourself. Once you have your site map drawn out, outline your home page on pen and paper. Draw out your tables and the file names you’ll be linking to.  Sketch your graphics out and position them accordingly. Note where you want to place any scripts or animations. Even if you aren’t the world’s greatest artist or your handwriting is tough to decipher, you’re well on your way to painting that picture in your head.

Now, outline each individual page you link to from your home page. As you begin with each page, ask yourself ‘what is the purpose of this page?’ Sometimes you’ll find there is little purpose in a page, and you’ll delete it from the site map. All the better. It’s best to find your flaws before you’re too deep into the project.

Now you start the coding/designing process. With a strong outline to guide you, not only will you work faster, but you’ll eliminate future mistakes and changes.Your vision will probably change to some degree during the creation process,forcing you to either re-map or redesign some of the pages. When that happens, get the same notepad and pen out, and modify from there. Trust me, laying out a site on paper is much faster than laying it out in code.

2. Design

Many people forget how crucial a site’s design is. There is a fine line between a well-designed site and an over designed site. You can enhance the design of a site (colors, graphics, etc.) by planning it in a similar fashion as you planned the entire site.

First, figure out what color scheme you want. Establish what colors represent you the best. Usually two colors is enough. If you’re unsure, try renting a book on color theory in the library, or look online for color theory resources. You don’t want your colors to be too subtle, nor do you want them to be too vibrant. Now sketch out your graphics/buttons. Try to keep the colors down. Lots of colors are not only distracting, they are also larger files. You want to keep your graphics clear, easy to decipher, and not too involved. If you plan to have any effects, such as rollovers, try to do it as subtly as possible. Before you begin creating your graphics, we recommend that you lay the site out without graphics. Instead use tables and table backgrounds to illustrate the color of the site. Create a rough draft of your home page. If this is a team project  show it to friends, family, or anyone who is willing to give it a look. Sometimes the best feedback can come from people who aren’t web savvy. If you, or others, aren’t satisfied with the draft, create another one and repeat the same process. Create as many as it takes and don’t work on anything else until you’ve settled on a final layout.

Once you’re satisfied with your layout start creating the graphics and plugging them in. You may find that what you had initially planned doesn’t work with the final layout – that’s okay. It’s inevitable that adjustments will be made during the creative process.

Once you are satisfied with the graphics, then move on to the other pages. We recommend keeping a similar look and feel throughout the site. If you feel that doesn’t work for you, then we urge you to use the same process for every page with a different or varying look and feel.

3. Speed

If your site is too slow, people will leave before the graphics even load. Sometimes when we encounter a graphics intensive site, we will search for an alternative while that page is loading. Your users will do the same. Nobody likes a slow site.You can increase your speed in many ways. Naturally you have to optimize your graphics. We recommend Macromedia’s Fireworks or Adobe Image Ready. Make your files as small as possible without compromising too much on image quality. Optimize your code. There are several utilities that will eliminate extra data from html lines to make a page smaller in size. Use them on every page on your site.Reuse graphics. Try to avoid creating extra graphics when you can use an existing one. A different graphic might make the site look a little nicer, but the existinggraphic has usually already been loaded and is still in the user’s cache. Last, make sure your server can handle your traffic. If your server can handle 10,000 hits a month, and you’re getting 20,000, do something fast. Either find a new, faster server, or mirror the site elsewhere. There is nothing you can do from a developers perspective to speed up a server. You can have the smallest graphics on the web, but your page will still take twice as long to load as it should. If you aren’t sure how fast your server is, find out. There are plenty of utilities out there that test server speed.

4. Organization

Your site has to be organized. Keep your ftp clean. We recommend creating as many subdirectories as you can. Create one for images, and create others for every other page/department on your site. On this site, everything is broken from large departments, to subdepartments, to subdepartments, etc. If you leave everything in one or two folders, maintaining it will be an absolute nightmare. The more you update, the less organized it becomes. Finally, you’ll get to the point where it takes longer to navigate the server than it does to create the updates themselves.If you move pages around a lot, use absolute urls (full urls) for your graphics and other pages. Yes, we all hate to use them and they usually take a while. But it’s a lot faster to deal with absolute urls than it is to fix 50 broken links every time you move a page.

5. Clarity

Keep it simple stupid – My favorite cliche.Your users have to understand what your doing. Keep your message simple and clear. If you do a lot of writing on your site, be direct and to the point. Don’t beat around the bush.Try to use one word menus, and alt text for descriptions, or window.status Javascripts. As we mentioned before, try not to use too many colors, and try not touse contrasting colors. Your users should have an idea where to go and what to do on your site as soon as the page has loaded. Don’t put the same links all over the place. Keep links in one place, or duplicate text links at the bottom of your page for non-text browsers. Keep your links to the left,right, or top of your page, and content in the middle. If it doesn’t seem like there’s enough space to include a link you want, either make the space or lose the link.Leave plenty of white space. Too many images and text together will confuse the user. Leave space in between. White space will direct the eye where it needs to go. Nobody likes ‘busy’ web pages.

6. Content

Your content is the backbone of your Web site I don’t care how good it looks, or how well designed it is, or how snazzy those rollovers are. If it doesn’t have good content, then it simply shouldn’t be there.When putting together your content, you should reflect on the planning stage and specifically your mission statement. Every bit of content should be in some way related to the mission statement, or it shouldn’t be there. If your mission statement is to make people laugh, then anything that isn’t funny should be left out. If your mission statement is to inform people about whale mating habits, then you shouldn’t be talking about browser updates.Don’t create ‘filler’ content. Don’t write something or put something online just for the sake of having something online. Plan your content as you planned your site. There’s nothing more irritating to us more than visiting a site only to find mindless banter. When writing, be direct and to the point. Use short sentences if necessary. If you need help writing, pick up a book at the library.The best writing is usually the most researched writing. If you have the time,research what you’re writing about. If you don’t have the time, either make it or have someone else write for you. We probably sound like a broken record, but use the library or the web.We shouldn’t have to say this, but DON’T STEAL CONTENT. Do your own research,or give your own opinions.Keep the content going. Update your site and your content regularly. Don’t put something up and leave it there for years. Everything changes, and as we in the development business know, things are changing faster now. Keep up on it. If the world passes up your content, the users will pass up on your site.

7. Service

A common misnomer about web development and Web marketing is that customer service is not a requirement. Not true at all. If you don’t believe me, pick out 10 random sites and e-mail the Webmaster See how long it takes to get a response, if you get a response at all. Sometimes we can be blinded by being too close to our sites. We should listen to our users for the same reason we seek outside advice on personal issues, or we ask others to edit our writing. You can never visit your site for the first time again. It’s a good idea to insert a mail to link somewhere highly visible on the home page. Encourage users to leave you a comment about the site, whether good or bad. Sure, you’ll get more e-mail than usual. E-mail can be hard to manage, but not if you check it regularly. When we’re working, my e-mail (several accounts) is checked every 5 minutes. I don’t read and respond to it every five minutes. But if we get a free moment, we read it, but more importantly we pay attention to it. No, we don’t answer every single piece of mail. That’s too much to ask of any Webmaster, but we answer anything we feel is important.User comments have helped me more than we can express in this article. The questions we have about our site, such as ease of use, clarity, are answered by our users. Plus, it’s gratifying to hear a positive comment every now and then.Not only will listening to users help your future development, but it will also make your users feel they have a voice. The web has become too impersonal. Any sign that the creators/developers care about the users is truly a relief. Remember that every person who hits your site is an actual person in search of something. A webmaster’s responsibility is to make that something easy to find.

8. A sense of personality

Entertainment is always welcome. Every page should have some level of entertainment. Whether it’s a joke every now and then, or cute graphics, or what have you, it should be somewhere.Even if you maintain a site on gardening, a nice bit of humor is refreshing. Now don’t go overboard on it. I would advise against having a Joke-of-the-day column ona gardening site, but something cute every now and then never hurts. Mix things up a little bit. Make it a challenge to make your users smile. They’ll reward you by coming back more often

9. Usefulness

In some ways this is the most important tip. Every site should fall under one of the following categories:

1. Informative

Offer information about a trade, a product, etc. Offer educational materials. Be a resource of some nature.

2. Service Oriented 

 Offer a service (search engine, downloads, auction, etc.), sell a product, or advertise a company.

3. Entertaining – Self explanatory. Humor, multimedia, etc.

If your site doesn’t fall in one of these 3 categories, We implore you to abandon the project before you waste any bandwidth. If you’re going to put up a web site, only do so because you feel you have something of value to offer the general public.

www.WebMediaExpert.com

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