Website Planning

Website planning or web-planning is the most important aspect of professional web-development. A website without a plan has no future; it will die out the moment any amendments are needed. We must carefully plan all aspects of the site and note them down for future references.

Steps of web-planning

Following are the most important steps:

1. Planning a sitemap
2. Choosing a color scheme
3. Link management
4. A Hint about Logos
5. Image formats

1. Planning a Site-Map:

A site-map is actually the skeleton of the website; it is a hierarchy tree of the website listing the home-page and then the sub-pages. The homepage is usually named ‘index.html’ or ‘index.php’ as a convention on most webservers. The hierarchy must be finalized before the development phase actually starts.

The most common pages Almost every website has the following common pages (other than the homepage):

1. About us/History
2. Contact Us
3. Site Map

Common Sitemaps

As an example if we’re making a website for an academic institution, we need to have the following typical pages:

• A page listing all the staff profiles.
• A page for a picture gallery of the institution.
• The oreganogram of the institution.
• A page listing messages from the key officials.
• A contact page listing phone numbers, emails etc of different offices in the institution.

2. Choosing a Color scheme:

A professional color scheme is very important to the appeal of a website. One must finish the whole website in a maximum of four or five colors, too many colors because a loss of professionalism, there must be a proper pattern. We must constraint the number of colors while keeping the neatness and visual appeal in mind.

Color scheme areas

Typical areas which should be addressed in the color scheme are:

• The website header background.
• The website body background.
• The normal text.
• The menu bar text.
• Links text
• Footer text and background.

3. Link Management:

Link management refers to managing and documenting all the hyperlinks that exist in our website. Nothing ruins the website’s impression more than a broken link! A broken link or a dead link means when the web-page that the hyperlink refers to doesn’t exist. We must thoroughly check the links and anchors and see if they address the required web-page correctly. Sometimes a spelling mistake or a typo in the <a> tag might cause a broken link. Example: <a href=“sitmap.html”>Our Sitemap</a> will not work properly because usually the page is named “sitemap.html”.

4. A hint about logos

A Logo is a graphical depiction of an organization. Logos usually have proper copyrights and can not be altered or even used without permission from the organization. When developing a website for an organization you must put their logo on their site. If they don’t already have a logo, they count on to you to make them one as you’re the designer. When putting the logo on the webpage, remember to keep the aspect ratio, i.e.-e the length to width ratio constant, we can NOT resize a company’s logo to our liking. We can’t change the text or background colors either, if it doesn’t fit in your website, Change your website’s theme!

5. Image formats:

Images make an integral part of a website’s appealing content. Before we can use images we must know about image formats and what we can and cannot do with each format. The most commonly used image formats are the GIF, JPEG, PNG and BMP images.

The GIF format

The GIF format has the following qualities:

•  Stands for “Graphics Interchange Format”
• It can hold a static or an animated image.
• It tends to have low sizes and hence small loading times when put on websites.
• Most importantly it supports image transparency.

The PNG Format

• Stands for Portable Network Graphics.
• Holds static images.
• Supports image transparency.
• Small sizes usually, due to lossless compression.

The JPG format

• High quality images
• Adjustable compression to quality ratio.
• Tends to have higher sizes
• Does not support transparency.

The BMP format

• Stands for Bitmap.
• Uncompressed usually
• Tends to have very high file sizes.
• Not usually used in web-development.

A few general hints

Remember, whenever someone gives you a website project they expect you to do everything for them. You must develop a proper web-plan and then ask them to give you the required information for filling that web-plan. For example once you have a proper site map you can ask the organization to give you data regarding their history, and staff list etc. Always give the clients more time that would normally be required in situations where you decide the deadline,finishing before the deadline is good finishing after is not!

Thanks!

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