Theory and Concepts of Web Design
Website planning and designing is probably the most important part of building a website. Also is the most frustrating part if you don't start with a good understanding of how the internet works and or having unreasonable expectations about how the site should be designed. However, a well made website gives business a corporate identity in the web. Therefore, the website should be interactive, communicative and user friendly. Before we begin, we should keep track of several points. For example; who is this website trying to portray? What is the purpose of the website? Who is the target audience? What are the goals? What major themes will the website contain? What multimedia elements will you use to convey your message? And how long do you have to develop the website? These are the most important points which one should keep in mind before constructing a good website.
Who is this website trying to portray?
As we can see, websites are intended to presence such of information. No matter what you plan your site to be, it is essential to define the exact objective of the website before planning the course of action. The objective should be focus on the basic requirements of the customers and how can the website assist them. Another word, the objective should define what the website can achieve and what benefits can the users get. If the website doesn't have much of information and contained such of useless information most likely the audience will leaves the site in second.
What is the purpose of your website?
A clear purpose of the website can give us the fuel to construct a website. With the defined objective, we can easily identify our target audience. Setting short term and long term goal for the website will also make clear plans for the future's expansion, and modification.
Who is your target audience?
This is depending on the purpose of the website. If you plan to have a website that helps people to learn about the new stuff, your website should targeted the audience, or if you plan to sale such of things over the internet, your website should targeted the customers. It is important for us to know that, who is going to visit the site and how can they benefit you. Defining the right target audience is the foremost step in the website planning process. From my personal experience, whether I built a business site or informative site, I always identify the target audience to grab their attention so that they can stay longer in my site.
What are your goals for the website?
A vital step in deciding what type of web site is right for your business is to clarify what information we want the user to see. For example, if we plan to create a Wiki page, the content of the page must have information associated with the Wiki page. This decision will also affect among other things like the content of the home page where we publish it.
What major themes will your website contain?
To choose a good theme for the website we need to take a look at ''Who is your target audience?'' section. We have to choose such of theme to match the content of our web site. Another word, we must choose a keyword that matches our content. The most popular a keyword is, the harder the competition. For example, in my design, I choose to put ''The social networking forum'', because social networking also associated with the social network like MySpace, and Face Book. They are the most popular keywords in the search engine (Aphids, 2002).
What multimedia elements will you use to convey your message?
Flash and similar multimedia tools have their place on the website, but not in site navigation. Many website use multimedia to tell a tightly scripted story, provide a rich feature and realistic demonstration. However, avoid the use of multimedia if the visitors want to quickly and easy access to information. Some sites use Flash for their menus, however, often found inconsistent with the standard browser. Most users like me expecting to just click on an item and a new page quickly appear and clicking on ''back'' to take me back to the last page I were viewed. Most often, Flash and rich multimedia introduces unconventional interaction requirements and time consuming animation. Additionally, Flash and rich multimedia can also take a long time to download which could cause the users to leave the page.
March 2, 2009
By: William Nguyen
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