Learning Aim B

 It is a good idea to think carefully about the design of a website before you try to implement it.

 Before you start work on creating a website, you must complete a design.  Your first task is to identify the intended purpose of the website, the target audience and their requirements.  If you are working to a client brief then you must read it carefully and ensure that all the details are clear.  If they are not, you must clarify them with the client.  If you are creating a website for yourself, then write down a clear statement of its purpose and the requirements of the intended audience.

 The purpose of a website may be stated as a problem it is intended to solve. This might be something like 'our high street shop sales are falling and we want a website to enable us to sell items on line' or 'our rock band isn't as popular as we think it should be, so we want to promote ourselves and increase record sales in Europe and across the world'.  Having a clear purpose to your site will provide focus when you are thinking about what features the site needs, what style it should have and how it will meet user requirements.

 Consider what features and functions your site needs to have in order to fulfil its purpose and meet the requirements of its intended users.  Consider, for example:

 Will users have to register to see the site's content?  Will users be purchasing items from the site?  Will users want to be able to search the content of the site?  Will users want to be able to feed back comments to the site, interact with one another through a forum or link to social networking sites?  It is important to understand your audience (users) and what type of functionality and features they will need- and possibly expect - the site to have.

 The user requirements might include the sort of language you use (for example, formal or informal, technical language or a more straightforward level of English), the colours and font styles you choose and the images and other media (such as videos) you include.

 Do not think of the design process as a one- time event where you sit down and create a design from start to finish within a couple of hours.  Instead, it is a cycle in which you think up ideas, try them out and refine them, rejecting some ideas and developing others.

 A site map is used to define the different pages on your site, their subject matter and how they are linked.  Site maps are either hand-drawn or drawn using the simple graphics facilities in programs like Microsoft® Word®.

 As part of the design process, you may create hand-drawn sketches of page layouts or actual prototype web pages laid out using your chosen design, but containing dummy content.  Your design should then be developed into style sheets and/or layout templates and a storyboard.  It's a good idea to sketch out several different design ideas and then decide (perhaps with the help of others) which design you will go with.

 A style sheet defines a hierarchy of formatting, to give your website a consistent and easily adjusted formatting structure.  As well as defining text formatting, styles can also define page layouts and paragraph formatting, such as text and image alignment and spacing.  You should create a table listing each type of style and the formatting that is associated with it.  You will cascade these styles throughout your website, this is why they are known as cascading style sheets (CSS).

 You will need to create a storyboard towards the end of the design process, as you finalise your design and decide exactly what you plan to have on each page.  A storyboard is a multi-panel drawing or diagram of your website, showing its content and structure.  You can draw storyboards by hand or using a computer.

 Storyboards should be annotated to show the formatting being used for each element of your page (i.e. colours, fonts, sizes) and explain where hyperlinks will take the user.  Assets such as photos or animations should be linked to the asset list by their asset number.  Your storyboards don't have to show the actual assets and text content of your pages; you can use dummy content which you replace with the real content when you actually develop the pages.

 Your storyboards should enable you to list all the different digital assets you will need to complete the web pages you are designing.  Digital assets can include things like images or diagrams, videos, animations and audio.  You will need to create some of these yourself and others will be ready-made (for example, Clip Art).  Your asset list is a list of everything you need and where you plan to get it from.  You must document and reference the sources of any ready- made assets so that you know where they came from and can seek permission to use them.  Your asset list can be used as a check list as you gather the assets during your construction of the site.