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Analyze Content
Analyzing and deciding upon the content of your website
What information do you need to build your website?
If you are designing a website, you will need to know the answers to the questions on the preceding page so that you can develop some well defined goals. Do you have a special logo that you want to use? Do you have a specific color scheme in mind? What data and graphics do you need to collect for your website content? Are you going to have a message forum on your site? Are you going to have a newsletter for informing visitors of updates or new content? These are all things you need to consider. Make note of them in your website journal.
What type of content will you provide to your visitors?
Gathering all the content that you want to include on your website is a big job. Are you going to use photos? What kind of website graphics do you want? And what information or data are you putting online! Are you going to provide tutorials? Make a list of the items you think you will want to have on your website.
Make notes about what you need to do such as scan photos or documents, locate or create graphics, write tutorials, sort and organize website data. This is a good time to create folders or binders for your website project so that you can keep the content organized. You might need one folder for Graphics, one for Photos, one for Data, one for Tutorials and one for Miscellaneous information. Your website content will determine the folder titles you need.
Planning your website for the long runTime spent on this most important phase of website design will pay dividends in the long run. The planning that you do now will make it much easier to develop a website maintenance plan once your website is online. There are a multitude of details that go into the design of a professional site and solid planning in the early stages of website design will help eliminate problems down the road. Spend as much time as necessary planning your website assembly now and any future redesigns and revisions will be much easier to accomplish. |