Great. You want to take control of your marketing efforts, or maybe inform the members of your non-profit, or simple express yourself. A website is a great tool for those needs. Others too. But you already knew that. You just want to know where to start. Here’s the distilled knowledge I’ve gained from 8 years of professional design and by teaching five years of web design and Photoshop community education classes through our local college.

What do I do first?

Figure out who your audience will be. This is the single most important step you can take and the one you will most likely skip. If you don’t do this, your website will not be as effective as it should be.

The owners of a fine crafts gallery recently came into our shop and wanted us to update their website, which is sorely needs. I asked who their market is. The answer I got is, just about everybody. Wrong answer. Unless you are selling goods or services that insure very basic survival, what you offer is discretionary. People buy from you or join your organization for some emotional reason. That’s what you need to appeal to with your website. They didn’t answer that question the first time their site was built and it never worked well.

Now we could make some good educated guesses for the client. Types of business fall into classes and with over 30 years combined experience between the three of us we have a pretty good idea of what makes an effective web site. But it would be better still if the shop owner would be specific.

Fine, you can’t narrow down a particular demographic. Your customers are wealthy and not, young and old. I believe you, mostly. But there is some experience that people are expecting when they patronize your business or organization. When you identify that, then you can make a truly effective web design, and probably increase your sales off the web as well.

Once you figure out your audience, then you can decide what content will appeal to them and what format they would most like to get the content in. If you can’t figure out who your intended audience is, then you are not ready to build a website.

Okay, what do I really do first?

You don’t believe me with the first answer. That’s a personal problem. You will be back later to discuss why your website isn’t effective. Yes, we’ll get back to that then. It will cost you more, probably a lot more, but most of us need to learn the hard way.

Before you bake the cake, buy the ingredients

Or in the case of baking a website, get your content. Create content. Buy content. Write your page text, or arrange for someone else to do so. Gather your photos, movies, audio files, charts, whatever. Write you bio, resume, rant or tutorials. If you are selling something get your photos and ad copy together first.

An effective web design flows from the content. If you make a site first then you will be forcing your material to fit in ways that aren’t logical or easy to navigate. That will diminish the site’s effectiveness and number of visitors. It’s simple, really. People won’t come back to a site that confuses them. They will come back to a site that has good content that is meaningful to them.

Chose your photos

Along with your text and media files you need to gather photos. A website without photos will have a poor impact. Making images ready for the web is a whole subject in itself. But getting the photos, charts, illustrations, or other graphics assembled is the first step. The next step is to sort them and decide what goes where. I recently got a CD with almost 700 images on it for a site. I and the client spent untold hours sorting through that pile to find the couple of dozen photos that we actually used. She didn’t save any time for herself, by giving me all the photos. She still had to go through them, but did pay for those hours of design time I spent in creating contact sheets and communicating just which photo (still with the camera generated file names) went where. Give your images descriptive file names while you’re at it. That makes figuring out which is which much easier later.

I’m currently within a day or so of design time from finishing 4 sites. All are built. The pages are in place. The navigation is set. But each site contains empty pages, waiting for the client to get me the last bit of content. This is so common that we make jokes about it in the office. Don’t be the butt of a joke. Create or gather your content first and your site will be up quickly.

I’ve got my content, now what?

If you have your content assembled or at least a good list that lays out what you will need to create or gather, along with a timetable that makes it firm when you will get it, the next step is to plan your site layout. What will go where and how will your visitors find what they need? What we’re talking about is site structure. How can your content be logically grouped into meaningful sections, categories and subcategories.

Your Site Map

A professional web designer might create a handy dandy site map for you, with cool colors, arrows, and graphics. It’s good marketing to make all content that the client sees look nice. But you don’t need to do that for yourself. There are simple alternatives that work just as well

• Outline everything with bullets. Place subsection pages in a secondary, indented list.
• Use a yellow pad and pencil to draw boxes and arrows.
• Use a spreadsheet to divide content by category.

I’m sure there an numerous other ways to diagram or outline your page structure. Lay it out with Lego if you want. This will give you the idea.

Wireframes

What the bleep is a wireframe? It’s the jargon web designers use to describe what goes where on pages. Where does your logo go, your tagline. Where will you put your navigation, AdSense ads, banners, contact information. Where will the main content for you pages be placed. Are there repeatable ads, sidebars, etc. on your pages. Draw them out. You shouldn’t worry about making this part pretty. We’re still framing your web pages not putting up the wallpaper yet.

Don’t get tricky with your page layout. Standard web page layout is what your visitors expect. I guarantee you that if you come up with something new and clever you will confuse your visitors. You say you are making an art site? Great. Art if for you. A logically laid out page is what your visitors need. Put things in normal places and label them well.

Designing your site – finally

Believe it or not, you are more than half done with your website now, without touching a web design program. The vast majority of unfinished sites don’t bog down because there is no design for the pages but because there is no content.

You have undoubtedly seen the dreaded Under Construction image. Write that site off right now. It will never get done. Just as bad is the Check Back Soon notice. Once your basic site design is translated to HTML it is trivial to put content in your pages and style it. Modern web design programs will hide most of that nasty old code from you. You will edit your text much the same way you do in a word processor like Word.

Starting the actual design

My first advice is simple. Don’t try to design a site from scratch yourself. Don’t do it. Your site will look amateur and home made. Even if you are experienced with graphic design, the likelihood of your creating a modern looking and functional website are low. I know several very capable graphic artists, people who are Quark or InDesign wizards, who can make Photoshop and Illustrator jump through hoops, who can create brilliant brochures or magazine layouts. Not one of them can create a quality website, even though they advertise web design and do take unsuspecting client’s money for doing so.

Don’t get me wrong. An attractive website will work much better than an ugly one on a number of levels. But too often graphics designers who haven’t studied web design create the dumb blonds of websites. They may be pretty but fail in accessibility, usability, search engine optimization and including modern web feature like interaction, and connectivity, RSS feeds, database connections and so much more. Don’t worry if you don’t know what all that means. Graphic designers don’t either. Web design is an incredibly quickly evolving discipline, one that even dedicated professionals have trouble keeping up with.

So if a professional graphic designer can’t make you a good website what chance to you have of creating one from scratch on your own? Slim, slimmer and none. Should you give up now? Not at all. You have lots of options. I just don’t recommend a home made design, unless you are more interested in learning web design than in creating an effective website.

Interlude: The evolving web

A digression is in order here. The world wide web started with what are now called static pages. They were pages of simple text, formatted with a simple formatting language, HTML or hypertext markup language. The hypertext simply means pages have the ability to link to other pages. You can consider HTML as a sort of longhand word processing. You want to define a paragraph? Wrap p tags around it. There’s really not a lot to it. Learn a couple of dozen tags and some attributes for them and you can write a web page.

Back even just ten years ago that was good enough. The web design started to evolve as a profession. And to differentiate themselves from the non-pros, web designers began to make ever more sophisticated designs. Then to add more functionality to sites, designers began to connect them to databases via complex programming languages. A competent modern designer will have at least a bit of familiarity with a couple of programming languages, HTML, a quickly evolving styling language called CSS, as well as having a solid design background and an understanding of the architecture of information and interaction design. Yes, it’s a lot, and no one is expert in all the fields but needs as least a smidgen of background in each.

What’s the answer?

The simple answer is to use the expertise of web professionals, some of whom have put a lot of clever thought and effort into hiding the mechanics of web sites from the end user. You no longer need to be a mechanic to operate a car. Once you would have needed to be one. You let the manufacturer make your car and you mechanic maintain it. In between you go a lot of places in it and make it do pretty much what you want. It is becoming possible to do the same with websites.

Use a ready made web system, add your content and bake your site. If you want a custom design, hire a pro web designer. Have him or her connect that design to a content management system and spend a short time learning to use it. You are in control.

If you are happy using a pre-packaged design and tweaking it some, adding your own logo and photos, you can even skip hiring the designer, or pay one a lot less to handle only the technical parts.. These pre-packaged designs are called templates and the better content management systems offer you a number from which to choose. Many are pretty awful but some are surprisingly attractive.

In the next installment we’ll get into some website options that can get you online with a minimum or grief.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 9th, 2007 at 1:41 am and is filed under Best Practices, Casual User. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.