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Before you BeginThe Goal Your Audience Content Before you start making your website, you need to plan your site. You need to know what you want you site to be about and what you want to acheive with it. So you need to define you site and have a set of defined guides. Also you will probably need to think of what you would need to create your website and what type of project it is, short-term or long-term, do you need anyone to help manage your website, do you need to constantly update it, and such and such. These are all very important to creating a website. First you will need to define your website. You may want to ask some of the following questions:
The questions above are very important to making your website. If you are not able to answer atleast most of it, then you probably don't really have a clear idea of what you are doing. With some websites, once people start working on it, they will skip this process and go straight to the design process, but this is actually the most important step to any website. Being able to define your site will help you in creating your site later on and will insure that you have a well organized, informative, and successful website. If you want a successful website, you will need to do this and it will help you and add to your website's success. This will help you determine the budget, goals/purpose, site content, etc. It is known as the planning stage which comes before the design stage. The planning stage is crucial and should not be looked at lightly. You should think about all the problems and changes in your site in this stage and how you want to manage it and try to think of ways to organize your site so that it makes it easier to update and navigate.
The GoalThe Goal of a website is a short statement that basically defines a site. It tells the purpose, budget, expectations, etc. of the site. It covers all aspects even including the design of the site. You will need to understand that a website is an on-going process and not a one time thing, you will need to keep updating it constantly to keep if fresh and updated. How you want to update it and who is going to manage the website should also be included in your goals. It is always good to write down your goals so you can refer back to it later on or edit it as your site progresses.
Your AudienceEvery website has its own specific audience. A website can have all kinds of audience and that's usually a very general website. But most websites have specific audiences. After identifying your goals, you will need to need to identify your targeted audience. The audience is the people who will be viewing your site on a day to day basis or an occasional basis. You can target a group of audience by age, sex, intellectual skills, etc. You can also have a wide range of audience if your website is very general. When designing your website, always remember to include the perspectives of the audience (how they will view your site and what they will think and want). So if you think like and actually create a site for your targeted audience, then your site will be successful.
ContentContent is the things that you want to include in your site. This includes what type of information you would like to present to your audience and what type of information would you think your audience would like to view. At this stage, you will also need to look at what kind of content you have and will need. If you are short on content, you should start collecting more, and if your content repeats itself, then you will have to take out the repetitive parts. The content is what the audience is viewing, so this is very important because people are here for the content. If you content is good, then the audience will stay and come back, but if your content is not what they are looking for, then they will need. So make sure that you are providing them with what they need and that the content falls under the goal and purpose of your site. |