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Tips on Site Planning

Site Use-

To begin your adventure of getting a website together, you will need to ask yourself a couple of very important questions. What will the site be used for sales, product, company information or in-house information?

Your Visitors-

What do you want your visitors to leave with? Who are your visitors? What type of PCs do they most likely have? What kind of Internet access do they have, modem, dsl, t1 or cable? What screen resolution will most of them be using? What age group will be viewing the site? How do you want them to feel when they see your site? Once you answer these questions the answers you get will help you determine your visitor's needs, which will help you create a site that is very useful to them.

Flowchart-

Developing a flowchart is one of the best things you can do to get your site started. Once you have started a flowchart the layout of the site becomes rather obvious. This is a major step in the planning process. Most sites have between 5-10 main areas that break off into other areas. Its very important not to make these break off areas hard to get to. The easier you make the navigation to and from these areas, the better off your site is for return visits.

Examples for sections of a site:

About Your Company

Products

Links

Etc…

Once you have determined the main areas, decide the areas underneath each section. People on the Internet have a short attention span so make sure your content is no more than four clicks away from the main section. If it is, most likely they will never see all you have to offer.

Technology-

Keeping your visitors in mind, decide on the technology that will give them the best experience possible. If the majority of your visitors will be using older pre-Pentium pcs with small screens and 28k modems, you probably do not want to use things like Macromedia's Flash on your site. Animation, sound and video add to the time that a site can load. These things will slow down the access time to the pages on your site. Use them only when necessary, especially on sites trying to push a product or company.

Color scheme-

Selecting a color scheme is a very important piece to the puzzle also. After determining who your visitors will be, decide what colors will be most effective. As a company or a person with a message, you want to make sure the person seeing your work gets the feeling you are trying to convey. Beyond specific color-meaning relationships, there are also some general interpretations. Cool and warm colors convey specific emotion to most viewers. A web site designer who wants to sell rock CD’s to a young audience probably would prefer warm, high saturated, bright colors. A site selling to older more affluent buyers might prefer cooler, more sedate colors. In general, objects of similar hue form a common group while objects of different hue belong to different groupings. If you have trouble deciding on a color scheme ask us. We have a lot of experience in helping clients choose the most effective look for their websites. To find out more about color check out our article Tips on Color.

Keywords & Description-

Keywords are used by the search engines when they go out across the Internet to index site pages. If you learn how to use these effectively it will greatly increase the chances of a potential visitor find your site. These keywords are used in a couple different ways. First, you will want to use these keywords when registering your site with search engines. Some search engine sites will ask for keywords upon submission. Second, the keywords used in the meta tag portion of your html code; helps the search engines rank your site during searches of those words. You should think of anywhere from 25-50 keywords to place in the meta tag portion of your code. A good way to help you determine your keywords is to take a look at a similar site in content and View Source in your browser. The meta tags for keywords should be near the top. This should give you a good start.

Site Descriptions are also used in meta tags. Usually this is a one or two sentence description of what the site is all about. The search engines also index this tag, so its very important to use an accurate description.

Content-

When you are deciding what content you want on the site, keep in mind whether it’s relevant to the site as a whole. What file format will most of your content be in?

The best image resolution when scanning your images for the web is 72dpi resolution. Most scanners allow you to adjust these settings fairly easily. This keeps the file size small and keeps the appearance of the image intact. Then save the image as .jpg, .gif or .png. Most other image formats cannot been seen by most users.

When scanning documents, its best to use a scanning program such as OmniPage to convert the pages into plain text and save as .txt or Microsoft Word documents. Once in this format its easy to import these files into most web authoring programs to save as .htm files. If this isn’t possible, in order to be able to read the document online, most likely you will have to scan the image at 100dpi and 100% in order for it to be readable. This will create a large image file. Web hosts charge for space, so this could be something that could turn into a problem later. Another alternative is to turn the document into a .pdf file. This newer format from Adobe that compresses without, much of a loss in clarity and a smaller file size. To find out more about pdf files go to www.adobe.com.

Once you have gathered your content, decide which areas it would fit best in. Create a folder for each of the main areas of your site. Place the content you have for each area in the proper folder. Site creation will be much faster which will reduce the time and the cost of your website.

Conclusion-

The importance of getting a routine together to speed up the process of your site creations is vital to the speed of your future work. The more organized you are, the better quality and faster you can get the site completed.

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If you want use any of the material from this site please ask permission, although no permission neccessary for the free stuff area, just link to us somewhere on your site. Want to submit some info, graphics, tips, etc., email it to sstierwalt@digitaltropic.com