Website
Design - Identifying your goals
It's
time for your company to go live. Live on the Internet,
that is. The first step to building your presence on
the Internet is to design a website that customers will
want to visit - and come back to. Getting customers
to stay long enough to explore your website is like
getting them to stay at a store. Like a store, your
website should be attractive and professional looking.
Most
important: Whatever your business offers - whether it's
a product, a service, or information - it should be
easy to access on your site.
Whether
you're building a site from scratch or updating your
existing site, you've got a few options. Your goals
for the site determine the options you should go with,
so make sure you've got those nailed down first. Ask
yourself: What do you want to achieve with the site?
Will
you use the site to dispense information?
- Do
you merely want a Web presence so customers can find
you online?
- What
sections do you want in your site? (e.g. About your
company, company history, product pages, executive
bios)
- Do
you want your site to act as a virtual salesperson,
performing online transactions?
- Will
you need to develop any special tools for users to
interact with your site?
- Do
you already have a logo that your site designer must
incorporate in their design?
- About
how many pages are you looking to have designed?
- Do
you want your site to be structured to help gather
data for marketing purposes?
Depending
on your answers to these questions, you may be looking
for a one-stop shop or separate contractors to address
each part of your site. Designing your site can be as
simple - or as complex - as your imagination and/or
budget allows.
And
before you can decide the approach you want to take
to accomplish all of your goals, you should know the
difference between web designers and web developers.
Design
vs. Development
You'll
probably find the titles "web designer" and
"web developer" used interchangeably, but
this isn't accurate. Designing a website is actually
very different from developing one.
There are two major components to designing a website:
the "front end" and the "back end."
While there can be quite a bit of crossover, for the
most part design refers to the front end, development
to the back end.
Front-end
and design
The
front end is what your customers see: the "pages"
that display the graphics, the images, and the text
on your site.
Web designers concentrate on the front end, choosing
appropriate images and fonts and determining how images
and text should be arranged. A web designer's strength
is his or her appreciation for aesthetics. A designer
doesn't have to be a technical whiz. But one should
at least have a strong understanding of what will work
visually on a computer screen and what the technical
limitations are in designing for the Web. A good web
designer will also have experience in collaborating
with a web developer.
Back-end
and development
Developers
are part of a new breed of Internet professionals who
can help you build your website. Web developers work
on the back end, making a site work. This side of the
process is not visible to visitors, but it is essential
to enhancing the visitor's experience.
Back end functions include making images change or move,
allowing visitors to view different pages or enter data
about them, or performing sales transactions. If you're
hiring a web developer, learn to speak the language.
Make
sure the resumes of those you are considering include
the following skills:
- HTML
for the text and layout framework of a web page
- Web
Imaging to create and compress images for the Web
- JavaScript
to write programs that run as part of web pages and
to do tasks like validating form fields before submitting
aform
- ASP
to customize a web page for a particular user on the
server before it is sent down to the user
- Java/C++
to write programs that are embedded within a web page
- to do things that web pages alone cannot do, such
as playing a game within a web page
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