The 6 P's of the Web Site Design Process

Have you ever wondered where to start when designing your web site? It can be a daunting task for even seasoned web designers, and yet it often consists of a set of common steps. We've broken it down into the six P's of the web design process.

PURPOSE

A website without a purpose will work for a while but before too long will lose interest and scope. The purpose can usually be written in a sentence. HomeStarRunner.com might have a purpose statement like, "To provide a fun and safe website for people of all ages to enjoy original cartoons of Home Star Runner and his friends." This purpose statement tells us a number of things about the web site:

• It will have content suitable for all ages
• It will be a fun website where people laugh and want to come back
• The focus of the website will be Home Star Runner and his friends
• The website will feature original cartoons. Cartoons are usually shorter in nature.
• The main objective of the website is not necessarily to make money, although that could certainly result from a popular website like homestarrunner.com

Some important questions to ask when writing your web site purpose statement:

• Who will be your audience?
• Is the website for fun, for research, to inform, to generate revenue, etc?
• Will the website be free or cost a fee to use?

PLAN

Planning may seem a bit redundant after spending some time to write your purpose statement but it is something really completely different all together. The goal of the planning stage is to outline the structure of your website. What will your website contain? How it will it be laid out? What colors will you use? Do you have a logo or branding that you want to convey? These are all important things to plan for before you get into the design. Thinking about these steps now will be save you time later.

Some other questions to think about are: What is my website's name? What will I use as my domain name? What kind of hosting platform will I use? Windows or Unix/Linux? What server technologies will I use? ASP? ColdFusion? Java? PHP/MySQL? Although not all of these questions have to be answered now, it is important to be thinking about them as you progress through the web site design process.

PROBE FOR RESOURCES

This step goes right along with the planning step and is often times done at the same time. Probing for resources is all about ideas, inspirations, research and finding out what's already out there. You want your web site to be unique and original and you want to be able to leverage as many available resources as you can. Are there similar sites to the one you are designing? What do you like about them? What do you dislike? Are there technologies or resources that you can leverage to make your site more quickly and more effective?

PRODUCE A DESIGN

Once you have thought about your web site's purpose, made a plan and probed for resources, the next step is to produce a design. For me this is almost always a result of finding several web site designs that I like a lot and taking elements from each along with a few original ideas I have and merging them into one concept. There are a number of software programs you can use to aid in the web design process. My favorite design tool is Photoshop with Image Ready. Photoshop allows you to unleash your creativity while Image Ready lets you slice up your design and create roll-overs so that your graphic design can quickly morph into a web pages. One technique that I highly recommend is using some kind of include files or libraries so that you don't have to duplicate common code in your web pages. For example, your copyright will probably appear on every page, so put this in an include file so when you need to change it, you can change one file to update your whole website.

POST THE PAGES

After nailing down a design and creating a template you want to post your pages. This step usually involves creating initial content that will be featured on your web site. The easiest way to do this is to start small. Of course it's great when you can start your web site with hundreds or even thousands of pages and resources but more than likely this will not be possible and will result in frustration and abandonment. So start small, with a handful of effective pages, products, or articles and go from there.

PILING ON CURRENT CONTENT

Piling on the current content refers to the tragedy of many websites in that they start with great content, ideas and goals and then before too long become out dated, stagnant, old and just plain boring. So it's important to continually update your website with new content. Think about the websites you go to the most... what do they offer? Why do you go there? What to do they provide you that no other website provides you with? Think about those things and then make your website that desirable.

Now that you've read through the six P's of the web design process, start making your web site design today.