Quick-Start Guide

The main parts of the task are:

• Business objectives
• Requirements specification
• Site map
• Visual design guidelines and style-sheet
• Content management system
• Data design
• Data load
• Master template
• Images (photography and illustrations)
• Page content
• Content templates
• Advertising
• Copy writing
• Testing
• Deployment
• Project management

Business objectives

Start by being very clear about what you want your business to achieve through this new system. Start with a survey of representative customers and staff. Distill the key points and write this down succinctly and in plain english. You may want to try using an on-line survey that is all done through email and the web. This can save a lot of time and the Luddites can always fax it back if they prefer. Better still, conduct a face-to-face assessment session based on a framework designed to bring out your most important information and processes.

Requirements specification

A good framework for requirements definition should include:

• business requirements
• user requirements
• content requirements
• system requirements

Make a list of the functions you need on the site. For example, in addition to online "brochure" material you may want to capture customer contact details. Whenever you think about getting your customer to do work for you (good for you) make sure that you have the corresponding features, such as a prize draw, that provide the incentive (good for them).

Think about your users: as a minimum there will be content providers and content consumers. Most sites have many more categories with different groups having different information to create and/ or view. Think how ease of use can be achieved for each user category.

Think about content not just in terms of the pages you need but also any underlying information resources that you need to create. For example, should information be categorised for ease of searching?

Also consider such issues as publishing procedures, security, time to recover from failures etc.

All this should again be written in plain language. When complete, review and agree the specification with your user "panel". Ideally, this would include key staff and important customers.

Visual design guidelines

It is good practice to have a consistent design throughout the site. Think about the overall look and what space on each page will be reserved for such things as your branding, menus, adverts etc. Remember that as the user resizes her browser you cannot guarantee that the right and bottom of your page will be visible. For that reason place must-haves top and/ or left.

Once you have this basic layout think about the fonts and colors you will use for different types of content such as menus, headings, running text etc. Take your branding into account in this decision. If you have access to a person with good visual skills, enlist their help with this. If possible, make a neat color sketch of the design.

Content management system

By this stage you should be getting a good idea of the requirements for content management. At the simplest end of the scale you could appoint a webmaster and let her manage the content manually. Most sites these days need a more automated approach so that this person can take holidays and not become a bottleneck.

Data design

Now it's time to think about the data that your system will need. Typically, you will require some fairly standard data sets. You can design these yourself or use some of the predifined ones such as:

• Company information
• Contact information
• Informative articles
• News items
• Messages (generic, support requests etc)
• Links to partner sites

Data Load

One of the first things you will need is a customer file. You can easily extract this in the form of a spreadsheet from your existing system(s). Once you have completed the previous step you will be ready to load your data into them new system. See the developer guide for details.

Master template

Now comes one of the more technical steps, you need to code up a master template and accompanying "style sheet" that reflect the overall design. A library of such templates is available to facilitate this. You may need a little help from someone familiar with web page design at this point.

Style-sheet

In order to have the ability to manage your design it is important to hold all information about fonts, colours and treatments separately from the content of pages. This not only makes page design easier but also helps to enforce consistency - something that brand managers typically require. Coding a style sheet is a skilled task but you can probably obtain a template to simplify this task.

Site map

Make a diagram that shows the pages you need and the flow between them. Avoid pages that will be long by dividing up the material into manageable chunks. But don't take this too far - every click must bring value, such as interesting content, to the user.

Images (photography and illustrations)

Referring to your site map, make a list of the images you require. These can be photographs or hand-drawn illustrations. Once these are on your desktop in digital form you should use a tool such as Photoshop to resize and crop them and convert them to the correct form (.gif or .jpg format). Normally you will design your layout for a screen displaying 800 x 600 pixels. Calculate the best size for your image such that it will be large enough to see properly but as small as possible so as to facilitate reasonably fast loading.

Page content

The actual content of your pages can be typed directly online or prepared offline in a suitable word processor. Note, however, that the web uses a different system of "markup" to indicate font changes, headings etc. Tools like Dreamweaver and Front Page make this easy at the editing stage but they have serious drawbacks unless used exclusively and do not support dynamic sites (ones that incorporate database content) at all well. Some content management systems like Kickstart have page editing capability built in. It is nevertheless best to learn about web markup and use it directly when you need precise control of layout and formatting.

Page layout

A number of things you will want to do with page layout are much more difficult to achieve than straight text and images. For these, the editor has the ability to create nested tables. This device is the standard way of achieving appropriate layout on a web page. Any book on web design will give you a good idea of how to use tables for layout.

Advertising

Don't leave it too late to think about advertising on your site. You may not be interested in advertising revenue but you do need traffic. One good way to get it is with reciprocal links from other sites. Small adverts are a good currency to barter in return for links that could bring traffic in to you.

Copy writing

Your editors can be anyone on your team who can write good copy.

Testing

Don't forget to test your site thoroughly and from the perspective of each type of user. Always have someone who was not involved in development test it too.

Deployment

Make sure that the site is submitted to search engines and that users receive adequate training. Search engine submission will be much more effective if you have suitable meta-tags in place - this is best maintained through your content management system.

Project management

Make lists. Set targets for each piece of work. Keep referring to them and checking things off as they are completed.