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Planning

Even simple Web sites benefit from a project plan. Whether you’re part of a large development team or a one-person show, a project plan will keep you on task and help ensure that your site is organized and well-designed.

Audience

Who is your audience?

• current students
• prospective students
• faculty and/or staff
• administrators
• the general public
• other
  
• How familiar are they with the information you want to present? (This will affect how you present your information.)
• Do they have any technical limitations (e.g., limited computer skills, old equipment, slow modem connections)?
• Do they have any personal limitations (e.g., vision impairments or learning disabilities)?
  

Goals

As you begin the planning process, identify the goals of your Web site.

1. What goals do you want to achieve with this site?
2. Prioritize these goals to help you make design decisions.
3. Refer to your goalsfrequently to make sure you're on track.

Content Identification

• Gather together the content (as much as you can at this point) that your users will access via this Web site.
  
  
• Determine what type of information your primary audience expects to find on your site.
  
  
• Request input from key stakeholders so that you don't leave out anything important. Encourage them to think about repetitive tasks or requests that could be streamlined.
  
  

• Create an outline of all the information that will appear.

A thorough and complete outline will help you create a sound structure and effective navigation model for the site. Group information pages into categories to be accessible through brief menus. Keep each number of categories to a reasonable number (under 8).

• Ask your users. What kind of information would bring them to the site? How would they organize it? Where would they look to find…? If the project schedule and budget do not allow for a user survey, look at your content from the user's perspective. Terms or categories that you think are obvious may not be so to someone who has never seen them before (in other words, an org-chart isn't always the best place to start).
  
  
• Keep in mind that writing for the Web is different from writing for other media. Web users tend to scan quickly for information rather than read long paragraphs. Often, print media must be rewritten for the Web. Good Web copy is direct and concise. Use headings, bullet lists and other techniques to structure your content for easy scanning.
  
  
• Refer to the SDSU Editorial Style Guide for helpful writing and editing guidelines.
  

Navigation

The term "navigation" refers to the method of moving between the pages of your Web site. This includes any buttons, graphics, or links that your users will click. Use these "rules of thumb" to make things a bit clearer for your users:

• Group things that work similarly on screen, e.g., search, contact, feedback.
• If you must have more than one method of navigation, be sure that each type is grouped together.
• Make certain that users can get to all of your content and that they can get back to pages that they have come from.
• If you are redesigning a site, and deleting pages or moving pages around, you may need to create a redirect page, so that existing links and bookmarks to your page will still work.