by Jonathan Cohen, FAIA

The ability to create Web sites is an essential business skill. Fortunately, the tools now available make creating Web sites both easy and fun, and anyone with basic computer skills can do it. Building a Web site requires a design process with distinct steps, not unlike the phased design process architects use to design a building. The process can be summarized as follows:

• Know your audience
• Plan a structure
• Design an interface
• Assemble resources
• Build pages and sites
• Upload to a server
• Evaluate and revise

Setting Goals

The first questions in any design problem are whom is this for and what is its function? Your first step should be to develop an idea of the Web site’s purpose, objectives, and target audience. List the kinds of informational transactions that will occur on the site.

Is it a hyperlinked statement of qualifications for a potential project? Is it a place for file exchange among project team members? Is it an advertisement for your firm’s services? Or a site designed to explain a design proposal and solicit comment from stakeholders? A statement of purpose will help clarify your objectives before you begin and can be used later to evaluate how well the site is achieving them. If the site is designed to meet specific quantitative goals of time savings, expense reduction, or schedule compression, state these goals explicitly.

Information Architecture: Complex Web sites require sophisticated ways of visualizing their structures, as shown by this three dimensional isometric diagram. (Courtesy Dynamic Diagrams)

Your assessment of an intended audience will include knowledge of the kind of information sought by your visitors. Some sites will be designed for a quick scan, others for a more leisurely encounter. It may help to think about what problems your visitors are trying to solve. Your task as a site designer is to know your intended audience so that you can develop a site that helps visitors find the information they need. Questions to ask yourself include: Is the site designed to be used by a limited number of people on a regular basis, or is it one that will be accessed by new visitors all the time? Will people be visiting the site several times a day over a long period, or will they visit one time only? Will visitors likely be on high-bandwidth connections, or dialing in on modems? Will visitors be consuming information onscreen, or will they be printing pages for later reference?

Software engineers classify computer users as dedicated or casual. The former are people who will be frequent and heavy users of specific programs and can be expected to spend considerable time becoming familiar with them. Casual users are infrequent or occasional users who need access to the most basic features without having to read a manual. In the same way, a well-designed site should accommodate users with different levels of expertise. Its layout should be quickly discernible to “power users” looking to get in and out as quickly as possible but not be intimidating to users with more limited Internet experience.

Consider the speed at which visitors are connecting. If the site is intended for a high-speed corporate intranet, you have more freedom to use graphics-intensive pages than if the expected audience is a construction superintendent using a modem to connect from the job-site trailer.

After you have completed a first draft of a site, test it. Try imagining yourself as a visitor to the site, looking for different kinds of information. See how long it takes for each kind of expected user to “score.” Compressing the path from home page to the needed information is your objective. Try beta-testing your site on people whose profile matches the planned audience.

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