DGD Consulting

With the completion of the planning section the scope of the website has been determined. You have established:-

• Who the site is aimed at
• What you expect to gain from the site.
• What your visitors expect to gain from the site.
• The features you expect the site to provide.
• A first estimate of the number of pages required.

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:-

• Look and feel of the site
• Content
• Delivery of the complex features (customised or off the shelf)
• 3rd party requirements (web provider or specialised services (forums, banking etc.)

Look and Feel

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:-

1. Colours. You may already have company stationary or a company logo and wish to continue their colours through into your website. Otherwise, limit yourself to 2 or 3 colours. Too many colours will make the page feel too busy and harder for the viewer to find the information he or she wants. It is also more tiring to the eyes. You can use a colour wheel and either choose complementary or split complementary colours as your palette.
   As an alternative, adjacent colours on the wheel can produce a two-tone effect.
2. Use a limited and consistent set of fonts and font sizes, for titles and the main text.
3. Select an easy to use navigation system. Most sites have them across the top of the page or down the left hand side. They are expected there, so don’t make life difficult! Sometimes page top navigation bars are repeated at the bottom of long pages as a usability feature. Drop down menus with more than one level are best placed at the side.
4. The masthead is the banner heading across the top of the web page. It often contains both a website or company name and the corresponding logo.The masthead may have special graphics, different fonts and a different (but complementary) colour selection to the rest of the page.
5. Look and feel is less important than quality content. Your colour scheme should not hide the content. Make sure there is a good contrast between your text colour and background colours. As a rule dark text against a light background is easiest on the eye.
6. Keep special effects to a minimum. Not only are they more costly to implement, but too many spinning graphics and logos will only distract your visitors from your more important content. They can also take time to download, by which time your visitor may have become bored and moved on. Other things to avoid are :-
   
   
   • Flash intros, revolving globes, bevelled line separators, animated mail boxes
   • Lots of pop up or pop under boxes.
   • Auto play music. Allow your customer to play music only if they choose.
   • Hit counters of the free variety, which says “you are 34th visitor”
   • Date and time stamps, unless your website is updated daily or weekly
   • Busy backgrounds.

Page Templates

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.

Special Features

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

Content Management

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.

Choosing a Website host and other IT service providers.

The web site will need to be hosted on a web server. The web server hosts the website and provides:-

• File space to store web pages, graphic files, sound files, movie files, scripting files, database files and other programs that might be used by the website
• Bandwidth. Strictly speaking this is the rate at which data can flow e.g. Mbytes/second. However in web hosting terminology, it is misused to mean the upper limit of data that can be transmitted per month. In the same way that your own internet connection may be limited to the amount of internet access allowed per month, so your website may also have a limit on the amount of access that may be made to it.
• Domain Name. This is your www name. A charge is normally made each year to retain the rights to it. This name is of great importance to you and should be reserved as soon as possible. Follow this link to NetNames Domain Checker, and you can check out which domain names are free for use. Normally you would require at least one .co.uk or a .com domain name.
• Emails. You may also want an email service that uses the domain name.
• Scripting and Databases If your features require run time facilities - such as formmail or use of database systems, then one of the ISPs offerings that include the required database or scripting language must be chosen.

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.

Review

At the end of the design process, the full detail of the website should be clear. Go through the following check list :-

• Are you happy with our page templates / sample pages?
• Are all the web pages identified their requirements documented?
• Has all the content and its source been identified.
• Have the ISP and 3rd party suppliers been identified.
• Has the design significantly changed the website? If so the plans may need to be changed. An increase in scope will increase development costs, so either the budget and timescales may need to be increased or facilities withdrawn. A decrease in size may allow features dropped in the planning stage to be included.