Blog
Plan, Plan, and ... Plan! - 2006.05.03
Having worked as a web developer at a University it is a well known fact that is a nightmare for meetings and getting everyone focused on a task. This get's especially hard for website development. Why? Because a very few outside the web development world know the process of getting a site up and running. Whether it is at a university or not the average business client will be the same way. So in light of this I am going to run through an overview of a couple of steps to help the process along. While most will seem like common sense it is something that could be easily forgotten.
Set Specific Goals and Deadlines That Everyone Must Fulfill
The biggest thing is to help your group of planners focus. If they don't understand why or what direction to go they won't do it in a timely manner. Bounce idea's around and write them all down. You never know what idea's might be expounded upon. Give them clear things to think about during before the next meeting. Plan for enough time, 3 to 6 months of planning for larger sites, to go over everything you need to. As the developer it's your job to keep the ball rolling and on schedule. Give each person or persons in the group specific jobs to do as soon as you know their strengths and your direction.
Content Drives the Design
So you've heard that before? Well, it's true. The goal of a website is to improve on the current or create one from scratch. In regards not only to design but in functionality. The only way to do this is through knowing what is going to on each page. If it were up to me I'd have a very simple layout for every site. First with just content, no design. Then build it out later. You really don't know what to build unless you know what the elements are and where they go. If it's a large site it's exponential! I'd sketch out with them a clear and detailed heirarchy of the site navigation. Then begin having them write out the pages, text. With a CMS they can write text as they want but you still need to know what will be on the pages.
A Pre Design Questionnaire
Writing up a simple questionnaire helps get an idea of how the site should look. Put down questions such as "How should the site make the web user feel?" or "Which emotions would describe the site's feel?", "Write down 3, or more, sites you like or don't like and explain why?", "What image do you want to portray to the web user?", "Who is the main audience of users you
are trying to appeal to?" Questions like these will help you define the design direction. Since you've already gained the content you know what you should design for in aspects of navigation and layout. It makes it much, much easier.
Technology
It's nice to use the latest and greatest. But do you want to continually support it when it goes down? I doubt it. Use something that is largely supported and will fill the needs of the site. Planning ahead is nice but nothing is future proof. In fact as soon as you start writing the code it'll probably be "obsolete". So plan that you might have to do upgrades in the future. Keep the code clean and well documented. Keep the technology a bit subdued on the client end but be robust on the server end. If you use too much technology on the client side it can be overwhelming to them. Use it to help them not annoy them. Find out the user load might be (according to usage charts on old site) and plan accordingly. Have user tracking in place to help weed out parts of the site that aren't used much.
Tapped out of words of wisdom for right now. I'll shed light on some specific parts later.
- Chris S.
Spam Monster a Cometh - 2006.05.02
Build the wife a site and 3 days later the "guestbook" is crawled with spam. Albeit I didn't secure it for testing purposes. What's most interesting is that not only was there no meta data but if you searched for it, with say Google, the results didn't show her site. The moral, secure any type of posting function on your site with captcha like functionality.
- Chris S. |
