With the completion of the planning section the scope of the website has been determined. You have established:-
Planning establishes the skeleton of the site. The design process now fleshes that out, establishing how the finished website should look and how its features will be delivered. The design phase considers:-
The impact of the look is a major contributor to a viewer’s first impression. Through your chosen colour scheme, text fonts, navigation bars and other screen furniture, you set the “mood” of the site. This mood should reflect the sites subject matter. A site dedicated to computer gaming might wish to generate a lively mood whilst a medical site should promote a reassuring and professional feel.
Above all, the site should be consistent. Your chosen look and feel should be maintained throughout the site. Your page layouts may vary but they should feel as though they all belong together.
When choosing your websites look and feel, consider the following:-
Bearing the above in mind, start to consider the layout of your site. Perhaps you have a site you like or a number of sites that you would like to pick and chose features from. To get ideas look at your competitor sites to see what they do. Alternatively there are a number of web sites that specialise in template designs – you can use these to generate ideas, or even decide to purchase one of them. From these ideas, a template or “master page” is constructed. This is refined until you are satisfied with the page layout and impact. Often as not, this template is constructed in the form of the home page. The home page is generally the most complex and often other page layouts are generated by simplifying this master page.
Review all the facilities that are required by the site. As with pages, determine the type of content required (text, photographs, graphics, movies or sounds), the volatility of that content, and who will be providing the content. In addition, consider how those underlying features will be provided. They may require coding from your website design team or specialist development skills from a 3rd party. You may require database facilities and skills. Alternatively your website may have to link to a 3rd party site where the service will be provided. Where possible determine the development software required by each feature, so when you choose your website's Internet Service Provider, you obtain the correct hosting package.
If a sequence of pages are required to provide the facility ensure these are noted here, and also included in the list of site web pages.
For complex features it may be necessary to have staff with responsibility for the feature. Training or knowledge transfer should be planned prior to launch date
A site consisting of static data only may never require any page changes. Minor text changes can be carried quickly by your website builder for little cost or by following a few simple instructions.
For designs with more volatile content please refer to the content management guide section.The web site will need to be hosted on a web server. The web server hosts the website and provides:-
Unless you have a database on the web server or an inordinate number of photographs, you are unlikely to have problems with file space. Bandwidth may be more of a problem and you need to make some calculations of the expected website traffic. Unless you are expecting light traffic, looking for unlimited bandwidth is often the more sensible option.
If you are running custom software on the server, such as form mail or perhaps a registration system, you need to know the programming languages being used. If you are using a web based database you need to know which database product is being used. There are two variants of web server – one that is Microsoft based and one that is UNIX/Linux based. Note the most basic offerings of an ISP may not include all the necessary run-time software.
Unix Based servers are more common and normally cheaper. Typically they support Perl, PHP and the MySQL databases.
Windows Based servers typically support ASP, ASP.net, Access databases.
Where other IT services need to be sourced, then normal procurement processes should apply and where necessary competitive quotes obtained. As part of this process checks you need to be sure that any required integrated working between the web server and 3rd party services is supported.
At the end of the design process, the full detail of the website should be clear. Go through the following check list :-