Planning Your Site
If you want to design a better website, you must plan the development rather than just jumping in and putting a few pictures and words onto a page in a graphical, WYSIWYG editor.
Have you seen websites which just don't work? We have seen plenty of those. Even some professional designers' sites have major problems, in all likelihood due to poor planning, although it could also be a demonstration of their lack of skills.
No, we are not going to list particular sites here - we do not wish to humiliate anyone. We do however pity their customers, who are not getting value for money if a large portion of visitors to their sites leave in disgust.
Failing to plan = planning to fail.
Hopefully the tips presented on this site will help you to build solid structures for your website. Plan the site and it is less likely to fail.
Obviously there are many different methods of planning a website and our blueprint may not suit your style. Experiment with our approach and others. See which method works best for you.
The Website Design Triangle
The design of a website is a bit like a triangle. One leg may be longer or thicker than another but they all need to be there to make a stable structure. A structurally sound triangle will never lose its shape. Neglect one of the sides or corners and the structure will not be as solid.
Designing the website
The design phase is where you deal with the basic layout, colour scheme, method of navigation and language (or languages) used. This is one of the most important aspects of site design as the whole site will be based on the model developed here.
Writing the website
Having decided on the website's structure, how do we actually go about implementing our design? What tools and programming languages can we use and how do we prepare the site for listing in search engines?
Testing the website
Will the site look the same to all our visitors as it does to us? The short answer: no. But will they be able to access the site and use the contents? How about people with some form of disability - will they be able to get something out of the site? If the visitor has a slow modem, will the site finish loading before they lose interest?
