Chapter 1. The Order of Things
It is important before beginning to build a website to have some idea of the whole project. Think of it this way: If you are going on vacation, you have a destination, a method of travel, a route, and a time table. Without any one of these things you probably will not have a very good vacation. Each of the parts is also interconnected. If you are planning on flying but don’t have a destination, you won’t be able to define a time table. Building a website is a similar process. I know you want to get to building and making your site as soon as possible, but if you get onto the road with no sense of your destination you are going to get lost very quickly. Also, the parts of the project have an order to them. You can’t go to an amusement park at your destination until you have travelled there. Knowing and following the order of these interconnected steps allows your plan to be a success.
In this chapter, we take a look at the steps for the entire website creation process, from planning to maintenance, in a very brief but fundamental way. Don’t be tempted to skip to the next chapter just because this is an overview. These steps are the foundational building blocks in the process of creating your best website.
Each part of the process is covered in greater detail later on, but it helps to have an overview of the whole process before you begin.
In this book, the creation and maintenance of a website is broken down into a process, which you should follow as closely as possible. This process comes from building my own websites and hours of discussion with successful web designers. Following these steps will help you immensely as the process continues. Each step in website creation and maintenance requires work and thought, but they don’t necessarily involve a computer or any technology at all. The steps in the process are outlined in Figure 1.1 and then detailed in chapters later in the book.
All endeavors should start with a planning phase. You have to plan out the steps needed to complete a project. The way I think of it, a project such as creating a website is made up of small steps that, when done correctly, result in a successful project.
This might be the easiest thing to skip, but it certainly is as important, and might actually be more important, than any other part of the process. By making plans and decisions early on, you will find that the later steps in the process are easier and seem more guided.
The following are some things you need to decide before you begin:
Why am I building this website?
What are the website’s functions?
What are the website’s goals?
Is this a website you expect people to come to once or return to often?
Who is going to design, build, test, and maintain the website?
What tools will be used to build the website?
What is my website budget?
Who do I want to visit my website?
For more on planning and the things you need to plan for, see Chapter 3, “Planning Your Site.”
There are as many ways to design a website as there are ideas for content and designers building those sites. When I talk about web design, I mean more than just the look of the website. Design is more than just graphics. It also includes the way the pages are organized (site structure), the buttons or links that enable the site visitor to get to those pages (navigation elements), and technical details such as how the programming language is used and application technologies. When I design a website I use a whiteboard to draw out what my page will look like.
Everyone wants a unique website, so it is very important for you to look at as many websites as you can before planning and designing your own. This will give you insight into trends that look fresh and new and which tired web clichés to avoid.
The key to creating an excellent website is taking your unique content and matching it to an excellent design. Chapter 4, “Designing Your Site,” covers many design decisions you have to make, as well as some trends in websites that have enduring qualities.
Far too often people start at this phase without doing the planning and design needed to create a successful website. Building is the actual work of creating pages, editing graphics, making links, managing multimedia, and adding scripts and other elements to the server.
In the past, a website needed to be created by hand. This meant each file that made up the website had to be manually typed by a developer. Luckily for you, this is no longer the case. The building section covers web page creation tools, graphics tools, and other utilities that enable you to quickly create a single page or an entire site without writing a single line of code, and most are free or very cheap.
If you have done your planning and design, turn to Chapter 7, “Elements of a Website,” to begin building your site.
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Testing? No one told you there would be a test. What I mean by testing is testing your website. Before you expect other people to come to your website, you need to ensure that everything on your website works. Some of the things you should test include navigation (moving from page to page in the site), graphics, and content (be sure no information is missing from your pages). You also need to get into the habit of testing and retesting your website with each change you make, even after your site is up and running. There are even free tools that help you test your website.
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After you have planned, designed, built, and tested your website, you are ready to send it out into the world. This is not the end of the story, though. You need to promote your website to others, make sure it appears on search engines and promote it to people you don’t know. Doing all of that is still not enough. You need to maintain and update your site so that people have a reason to come back to it.
