MSA Custom Web Design

Before you begin

Planning a Web site is a two-part process: first you gather your development partners, analyze your needs and goals, and work through the development process outlined here to refine your plans. The second part is creating a site specification document. This could be a 1 page document that details what you intend to do and why, to a full business plan style document that pin-points what technology and content you'll need, how long the process will take, what you will spend to do it, and how you will assess the results of your efforts. The site specification document is crucial to creating a successful site, as it is both the blueprint for the process and the benchmark you'll use to keep the project focused on your goals  and measure your success.

Planning

A good plan is your best weapon. Web sites are developed by people to meet the needs of other people (your customer or site visitor). Unfortunately, web projects are often approached as a "technology or software problem," and projects are colored from the beginning by enthusiasms for particular web techniques or browser plug-ins (Flash, digital media, XML, databases, etc.), not by real human or business needs. A great Team (Your company and MSA) is the key to a successful web project(s). To create a substantial site you'll need content, writers, information architects, graphic designers, technical experts, and a project manager responsible for seeing the project to completion. If your site is successful it will have to be genuinely useful to your target audience, meeting their needs and expectations without being too hard to use. Here are a few things to get you started:

• What are your goals?

  A short statement identifying two or three goals should be the foundation of your Web site design.




• Know your audience

  The next step is to identify the potential readers of your Web site so that you can structure the site design to meet their needs and expectations.




• Design critiques

  Each member of a site development team will bring different goals, preferences, and skills to the project. Once the team has reached agreement on the mission and goals of the project, an agreement on the overall design approach for the site needs to be established. The goal at this stage is to identify potential successful models in other Web sites and to begin to see the design problem from the site user's point of view.




• Content inventory

  Once you have an idea of your site's mission and general structure, you can begin to assess the content you will need to realize your plans. Building an inventory or database of existing and needed content will force you to take a hard look at your existing content resources and to make a detailed outline of your needs.




• Developing a site specification

  The finished site specification should contain the goals statement from the planning phase, as well as the structural details of the site:
  

  • Goals and strategies

    • What is the mission of your organization?
    • How will creating a Web site support your mission?
    • What are your two or three most important goals for the site?
    • Who is the primary audience for the site?
    • What do you want the audience to think or do after having visited your site?
    • What web-related strategies will you use to achieve those goals?
    • How will you measure the success of your site?
    • How will you adequately maintain the finished site?

  • Production issues

    • How many pages will the site contain? What is the maximum acceptable count under this budget?
    • What special technical or functional requirements are needed?
    • What is the budget for the site?
    • What is the production schedule for the site, including intermediate milestones and dates?
    • Who are the people on the development team and what are their responsibilities?

Quick Overview

Every project poses unique challenges, but the overall process of developing a comprehensive Web site generally follows six major stages:

1. Site definition and planning
2. Information architecture
3. Site design
4. Site construction
5. Site marketing
6. Tracking, evaluation, and maintenance

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