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| Step 2: Content Building There's a phrase that's often thrown around in the Web development world "content is king" This is true for most Websites out there. Most Websites want to be found and one key way sites are discovered is through search queries. Search engines frequently "spider" their database of Websites for new, clear, up-to-date, and original content, and Websites that have good content are rewarded with higher ranking and thus they are found more often. Its no wonder, then, that content building is such an important step in Web design. With the answers you got from Step 1: Planning, you should know what kind of content you will want to start building. If your goal is to sell music and electronics, and your target audience is college students looking to buy things like iPods and digital cameras, then you'll want to write some content that's lighthearted, down-to-earth, and to the point while still building on the popular "lifestyle" trend that sells gadgets like these so well. Or, as another example, if your target audience is a group of professionals in the medical research field and your goal is to pose challenging new ideas for collaboration or discussion, you'll want to write content that comes off as something of a technical blog. Ultimately, though, the most important thing you want to do in this step is get all your ideas for content down on paper or in a text file. You don't need to write the ads for your music and electronics right now, for example, and of course you wouldn't want to spend the time in this step to write along medical journal entry. For now, it's enough just to get all of your content down in shorthand. Just be sure you get it all. Once you have all your content in a place where you can look at it, you'll want to build your sitemap. This is the final step before you actually start designing the site. You can use a computer program to draw your sitemap like I did below, but most of the time a pencil and paper works best for this part. Lets take a look at a small sample sitemap for the music and electronics store we talked about earlier. TYPE THE DOCUMENT TITLE 23 Here we can see that our homepage links to four other pages Store Locations, Music, Electronics, and Contact Us. The Music and Electronics pages each link to different subsections. The Music page lets you choose a genre of music to buy, and the Electronics page lets you browse through different gadgets. When designing your sitemap, it's important to remember the 3- click rule. Simply, the click rule states that a visitor should never have to click more than three times on your site to do anything. In our sample sitemap, we can see that if a visitor wanted to get our other store locations, they would just need 1 click on the homepage. Or, if they wanted to browse through rock music to buy, they would just need to click Music on the homepage, then Rock on the Music page. Just 2 clicks. While building your sitemap, you should make sure that every box or page) on the sitemap will hold some of the content you outlined earlier. All of your content should have a place on your site, and you need to be able to visually see on what pages you'll put each bit of your content. And now that we have our planning and content building done, let's get designing Download 2.8 Mb. Share with your friends:
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