The Business Side of the Website Designer
and Webmaster
Conduct competitive surveys. Do a search and find your competitors,
then visit their sites and look at the services and goods they offer.
Do you fall in line with their offerings, or do you exceed them?
Maybe you fall short. If you fall short, then you will want to consider
adding to your goods or services to remain competitive with them.
Through this type of research, if the sites are successful, you
can gain insight to visitor needs. If you are dealing with a customer
that needs a site optimized or redesigned, you can use their access
logs to gain similar information from referring URL’s. We have another
tutorial on log
analysis data that will help you with referral URL’s. The information
will help you tailor your own sites and leverage your own sales.
Features
What features will you need for the site or page? Features can
be anything from graphics to input forms. To use SCGP as an example,
we have input forms, graphics, and generators to help our fellow
webmasters. Since you are reading this, you will also note that
we offer tutorials and articles as another feature. These are all
features, and should somewhat fall in line with what your competitors
are offering. It is a means to make sure that you are competitive,
and give people a reason to visit you instead of the rest. If you
can offer more than the competitors, then I would advise that you
do it. It will help set you apart, and give a reason for people
to visit you instead of the competition.
Keywords
What are the best keywords? While clicking around on our site,
you will notice that we tend to micromanage where keywords are concerned.
As we write articles, we determine what we want each article’s keywords
to be. Then we write the article with those keywords in mind. Carrying
it one step forward, we do a search for those keywords, and then
make sure to link the article pages to the high-ranking result pages.
We’ll use our canspam page as an example. At the time this article
was written, our canspam article dominated the top rankings for
searches on canspam, canspam act of 2003, and canspam tutorial.
For each of those search terms, the SCGP domain ranked either number
one, or within the top five.
When we wrote the article, our intention was to provide information
to those wondering what the canspam act was all about. We wanted
to provide the information to marketers so they could tailor their
email campaigns to meet the new law requirements. So not only did
we target marketers, but we also targeted email marketers too. Since
the page indexing, we have had between 2 and 30 visitors to the
main canspam index page every day. That is just one page, and a
highly targeted page at that. It accomplishes what we intended the
page to do. It draws in visitors, and gives them options to look
at other pages on our domain.
Creating the Wire Frame
The wire frame is nothing more than a sitemap on paper. Start with
a listing of pages for the site, and then add as much detail to
it as you can. List out features for each page, what you want each
page to accomplish, and what role each page will play in the site
design. The more detailed the better. View the frame through your
customer’s eyes, and then through the visitor’s eyes. Make sure
that you can find the information you want quickly and easily. Does
the layout make ordering easy? Can the visitor make contact with
the site owner, or is the contact information hard to find? Does
the framework include everything that the customer requested? Lastly,
view the page through the designer’s eyes. Is there room for growth?
Will the layout integrate with the shopping cart they want to use,
or will it require redesigning?
The wire frame allows you to view the proposed site while looking
for omissions. It is a tool to help you fill in the gaps and make
sure that all the pertinent information is there. It will help you
with customer flow, and evaluate different pathways a potential
customer might take through the site. By looking at different ways
a customer might navigate through the site, it will allow you to
provide navigation to help your potential customer get to other
areas of your site that you deem important. It will show you ways
you can try to lead potential customers through your site.
Creating the Storyboard
Create a storyboard for each page. These storyboards will contain
no graphics, just text. Use the text to define all of the content,
features, and functions of the corresponding site pages. Write the
content for the page, and insert the client copy. From that you
will generate the page content for highly targeted search engine
optimized pages. The storyboard will also help you to see relationships
between pages, and allow you to re-work pages where the relationship
is wrong. Continue going through the above steps to this point until
you have a working site concept. Once you and your potential customer
agree to the concept, it is then time to start developing the prototype.
Build the Prototype
Look at your information and identify the key types of pages in
the site concept. There are main pages, but are there also product
pages? Are there different sections to the site? If so, will each
section require it’s own type of page layout? Start by making a
page prototype for each of the types of pages the site concept will
require. Include graphics, fonts, color layouts, and anything else
that are needed for each page. Build a sample page for each area
and then submit it to the customer. Wait for their replies and iron
out the differences until you come up with what the customer wants.
Once approved, you can then move on to creating the final design.
Do not move past this step until your customer is totally happy.
Back
to Table of Contents
Finishing
The Final Design (Article Continues)
Other Legal Articles:
Related E-Book Downloads
By James R. Sanders
February 3, 2004
If you have any suggestions to add to this article,
or have ideas for articles you would like to read, please feel free to contact
us and let us know. You can also feel free to contact us about questions you
might have when it comes to practical webmaster or website design issues in
today's online market. We welcome constructive criticism and want to know what
our visitors think of our site and services. You can either contact
us here, or click the contact link at the bottom of the page. Thanks in
advance, and we look forward to hearing from you.
About the Author
James R. Sanders is the owner of Sanders
Consultation Group Plus. He has been a webmaster and website designer since
1997. He has also been involved in self employment ventures since 1992. He is
presently a contributing author of NewbieHangout,
and has been published through WebProNews
and 4Rankings.com.
His writing is targeted to webmasters, would be webmasters, website designers,
would be website designers, self employed, or those researching information
looking for solutions to questions associated with design, business operations,
and promotion today. His goal is to provide practical information based upon
his years of experience to help webmasters, website designers, and self employed
people achieve their goals in today's competitive global market. You can subscribe
to his free newsletters at SCGP
- Newsletter and become a member of the SCGP Portal. If you like SCGP content
and would like to use it on your site, then check out our content
agreement and terms of use. Use our articles on your site without the hassles
of writing your own content. Get back to the things you could use your time
better for, like site promotion.
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This page last updated:
Wednesday, October 19, 2005 11:41 AM
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