Designing a web site

Step 1 - Planning your site

• Deciding what to do

1. What works on the web?
2. Writing a mission statement
3. Stating your goals
4. Setting goals for a company site
5. Deciding what goes on the site

• Take action! writing a plan

1. Why bother writing a plan?
2. The basic product plan

• Naming your site

1. Choosing a name
2. Registering your name
3. Choosing a suffix

• Sizing up the competition

1. Identifying competitors
2. Evaluating competitors

• Getting to know your users

1. Learning about your users
2. Profiling your users
3. Estimating audience size
4. Visualizing your users
5. Predicting what users will want
6. Understanding user needs
7. Understanding user behavior

• Making money

1. The revenue models
2. 5 online revenue models
3. Making money from product sales and advertising
4. Making money from user fees & subscriptions

Step 2 - Designing your site

• Designing for the web

1. Designing for the user
2. Designing for web conventions
3. Designing for HTML
4. Designing for different systems
5. Designing for speed

• Organization & navigation

1. Site organization
2. Structuring your site
3. Documenting site structure
4. Site navigation
5. Global and local navigation
6. Creating a navigation system
7. 12 navigation systems
8. Naming site sections

• Usability testing

1. Usability testing on the cheap
2. What you can learn from usability tests

• Visual design

1. Front door design
2. Color on the web
3. Creating a color system
4. Making color work on the web
5. Typography on the web

• Understanding design technologies

1. Html & xhtml
2. Stylesheets
3. Plug-ins
4. Client-side scripts (javascript)
5. Server-side scripts (asp, php)
6. Java applets
7. How'd they get that look?

Step 3 - Building your site

• Building for the web

1. building for speed
2. building for compatibility
3. building for reliability
4. fixing a broken site
5. building for accessibility
6. building your site to last
7. building the backend

• How web sites work

1. how web pages are built
2. 3 ways to build a web site
3. picturing how html works
4. building your first web page
5. how web pages turn into a web site

• Preparing images & multimedia for the web

1. understanding compression
2. how compression works
3. understanding memory
4. images on the web
5. choosing an image file format
6. preparing images for the web
7. audio on the web
8. choosing a format for online audio
9. preparing audio for the web
10. video on the web
11. choosing a format for online video
12. preparing video for the web

 

• Take action! improving site speed

1. how slow is too slow?
2. a speedy site in 6 steps

• Adding applications to your site

1. choosing the right technology
2. developing software for your site
3. developing the application

Step 4 - Maintaining your site

• Monitoring & evolving your site

1. studying your site
2. sources of traffic to your site
3. measuring traffic
4. creating a traffic report
5. typical traffic patterns
6. a year's forecast
7. evolving your site

• Take action! increasing traffic

1. getting started
2. attracting new visitors
3. keeping visitors around longer
4. bringing visitors back more often
5. Promoting your site
6. word-of-mouth strategies
7. email strategies
8. choosing an email strategy
9. setting up an email list
10. linking strategies
11. online advertising
12. where to advertise?
13. targeting ads
14. types of ads
15. cross-media strategies

• Take action! improving your search rank

1. first understand how it works
2. then make a plan...
3. if all else fails ...
4. getting listed in search engines
5. improving your rank in search engines

• Managing a web project & team

1. managing a web project
2. managing a web team
3. assembling a web team
4. structuring your web team