Handout 2 - Website Design

Website Design

As mentioned previously there are five main reasons for creating a website: to inform, to educate, to entertain, to market, and to make money (sales), and very often these reasons overlap. In designing a website it is important to first of all know the purpose or goal of your website; if you do not know the purpose or goal of your website it becomes extremely difficult to decide on or determine a particular layout and structure for your website.

Having determined the purpose or goal of the website, it is now easy to determine who the intended audience will be, as the purpose of the website is inextricably linked to the intended audience. Knowing your intended audience is one of the key factors in designing a good and effective website, this is because your audience is the reason for having a website and as such your website should be designed around their needs.

Organising Information

The most important step in planning your site is to organize your information. This requires that you think carefully about what you want to say and how you want to say it, and that you become intimately acquainted with your site's content which depends on the purpose and audience of the site.

There are FIVE (5) basic steps in organising your information:

1. Divide your content into logical units
2. Establish a hierarchy of importance among the units
3. Use the hierarchy (from number 2 above) to structure relations among units
4. Build a site that closely follows your information structure
5. Analyze the functional and aesthetic success of your system [1]