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How to prepare and plan all the neccessary components to deliver successful content development, SEO, and interactive design.

Creating an Effective Website

Start from scratch and always have the user, their objectives and their experience at the forefront of development. The style of user interaction will determine the special features and applications needed and will differ across small brochure style sites, social or community centred forums and ecommerce offerings.

Content Development

Lay firm foundations for the website by clearly communicating the goals, objectives and target audience through the project brief. This will concisely state what the user expects to see and will be able to accomplish. Careful deliberation and mapping will make the process of creation, design and development easier to manage.

Budget Management

Planning a website budget that includes all the neccessary components that will deliver a successful solution should include, content development and SEO, interactive design, screen layouts, first build, graphic production, authoring, testing and bug checks.

Prior to the website going live it's a good idea to have a launch budget in place to cover promotion, advertising and site submissions. Post launch activity should also have some contingency costs allocated for future content management and page updates.

Interactive Design

Carefully designing an interactive site map at the outset provides a clearly structured overview of how the user will navigate themselve through the site, how levels of interaction are being set up and where navigational shortcuts can be made.

A site map can be concieved simply on a large whiteboard with boxes and arrows connecting overall subjects or created in a spread sheet programme such as excel. The aim at this stage is to group content under main topics or subjects, make decisions on which the user will find most important and effective, how the content links together to that end. This process of contention will also show where you may have left over content that doesn't neccessarily fit into a neat category.

Screen Layouts

Once the site map is finalised the screen layouts can be designed. Again a low tech approach can prove quicker by producing various rough structures on paper. This stage is more about choices than actually designing pages or creating graphics.

Thumbnails of 3 or 4 page levels starting with the home page and indicating all the constants in the template, such has headers, menus, headings, image position and blocks of text should be a sufficient and flexible guide for all the content that is likely to appear on the website. Consider fonts, colours, styling and a consistent descriptive language to be used in the text for contents, captions and links.

First Build

Before your create all the beautiful buttons and impressive whistles that will adorn your website, create a first build version of two or three templates. These can be a simple text menu to all the main topics, place holders with text tags for identification or blocks latin text or colour to show the position of images, forms and buttons. This allows you to focus completely on the functionality, accessiblity and how the visitor will get from A to Z in the by the shortest possible route. As you'll see in the next issue, as you progress through the design and production stages the creation of graphic and written content will take up the bulk of your resource