Planning Involved in Web Design

Contributed by Cyberworm

Plan before you plunge into web design

The planning involved in web design calls for probing answers to questions such as what, why and how. What sort of a web page do I need to design and what type of products or services does it intend to sell or promote? How effectively can I make it more advantageous than its contemporary web sites? Who are the targeted browsers viewing the web page and how best can I portray it in the web medium so that the web page is useful and attractive to the user.

Purpose for the web design

You have taken the first step in web design plan. After doing the background homework, you need to define the purpose of the web page. For example, if you are designing a web portal for tourism development authority your targeted audience may be local and foreign tourists, resorts owners, travel agencies who want to offer attractive packages, shopping malls in the particular area and so on. You could receive representative ideas from these users to further redefine your purpose. Now the next step would be to develop a strategy and based on that create the content of the web page.

Web design concept in terms of users

Taking the above example of developing portal for tourism development authority, you have drawn an exhaustive list of targeted users. At this infant stage, do not narrow down the list and try forming a wide range of individual users. Further, determine which of the users can you really offer useful information. With the remaining list, find out who are the users who have access to the Internet. Say a small departmental storeowner in the tourist region may not have access to the net and may not think of using the web page as an advertising medium.

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