This section is devoted to the concept and design of your web site. You will start first with critical assessment guides on what to look for in a well built site. Then you will design using what you've learned from assessments and adding standard principles and a few good Web Master tips. Finally, you'll take a humorous look at what you absolutely should never, ever do to a site!
The Two Most Important Questions
The two most important questions you should ask about your site are:
Who is the target audience?
What do I want this site to accomplish?
If the site is a personal site this should be easy to answer and your main purpose will be to have fun! But if it is for your business you need to design more carefully. The keyword becomes focus.
Assignment:
First make an overall outline. For now, put into words how you (or your client) envision the site. Who is your target audience? What is the site goal? What is it's title? Send the instructor an email attachment of this outline.
Make a Visual Map of the pages (if there is more than one).
Get Organized
This is particularly important for your future endeavors. Web sites have this uncanny way of growing out of hand.
Assignment:
Make a main project folder. Keep this on your project computer or on a disk. You will be creating pages and gathering content materials as you develop your site. Create a folder and subfolders for the different files you will be obtaining. For instance: A folder titled: Web Site, with sub folders titled Graphics, HTML, Scripts and Multimedia.
Study Good Design
The four basic principles of design, according to Robin Williams and John Tollett, The Non-Designer's Web Book, are alignment, proximity, repetition, and contrast. If you stay within those principles you are bound to do well. However, there are many more "tips" and "tricks" to making a successful web site.
Assignment:
Go back to the site you chose to assess in the Assessment assignment above. This time assess the site using the Good Web Site Design Tips document.
Send the instructor an email with your Design assessment critique.
We've all been to sites that truly grate on us. Annoying and distracting animated images that take to long to download and then end up having nothing to do with the site. Sites that take 3 minutes to download. Fonts that you can not read. Misspellings *grin*. Missing links. Poorly written Java that shut our browsers down in illegal error messages. Here's a humorous assignment on what not to do.
Assignment:
Budd has made an uuuuuuuugly design site. Totally on purpose. To teach some very valuable lessons in a humorous, albeit hysterically frustrating, way. Visit the following site. Send the Instructor an email with a list of 7 different "Don't Do This!" "mistakes" you found on this site.
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NIVERSITY OF
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LASKA
The Facilitator
