HTML 4.0 Sourcebook
(Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)
Author(s): Ian S. Graham
ISBN: 0471257249
Publication Date: 04/01/98

Chapter 5
Strategic Web Site Design

By Ian Graham and Kelly Peters¹

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¹Kelly Peters is a professional Webmaster and has worked at CANOE, Canada’s largest Web site, since December 1995. Ms. Peters has been an active organizer, speaker, teacher, and writer on Web topics since 1994, and has made numerous presentations at conferences such as Comdex Canada and Internet World. Ms. Peters is on the board of directors of the Association of Web Professionals and is the current director of Toronto Webgrrls. She wishes in particular to acknowledge the kind support of Hugh Stuart and Tamara Atkin.

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The preceding four chapters looked at technical and theoretical issues associated with Web site design. This chapter takes a complementary approach and looks at the strategic issues behind developing a site. These are issues of intention and goal, rather than design, so this chapter does not have as many figures as the preceding chapters. It does, however, use URLs to reference sites illustrating the points raised. Indeed, this chapter can be usefully read while sitting next to a Web browser, so that the reader can access the referenced URLs and “follow along” with the book. To help with this process, the book’s supporting Web site has a document that lists these URLs, which you will find at either of:

www.compbooks.com/graham/html/chap5/links.html

www.utoronto.ca/ian/books/html4ed/chap5/links.html

The first step in a site’s development should be is to determine the goal of the site—indeed, this should be done well before the first HTML page has been coded. To help you analyze your own goals, this chapter looks at four characteristic goal-based site models, namely: marketing, customer service, e-commerce, and content-driven. Each of these four sections provides guidelines for developing such sites, and references example sites. Although the quoted examples are commercial Web sites, most of the guidelines apply equally well to sites developed for educational or nonprofit organizations.

Once the purpose of a site is known, the next step is to understand the customers—who they are, what they are already getting, and what they are likely to want. The next two sections of this chapter look at approaches for obtaining this information. The first of these looks at performing a competitive analysis, and attempts to convey the importance of researching the sites already on the Web. The next section looks at ways to analyze your target group. Knowing what is already available and understanding the intended audience will strongly affect a site’s layout and design.

The last third of this chapter explores some of the issues involved in designing a site’s architecture. Subjects discussed include: choosing the development team, creating a storyboard, determining the right number of links off the home page, designing a site metaphor and navigational scheme, testing the site before launch and, last, planning for ongoing maintenance.

Marketing Web Sites

With over 90 million users, there is no doubt that the Web is a worthwhile marketing venue. A Web site can serve as a 24-hour-a-day sales marketing arm, with a well-designed site yielding greater consumer awareness of a company’s brands, products, and services. Indeed, many companies and other organizations have already started to use a Web presence as a “next-generation” marketing tool. Perhaps this helps explain why, according to the authoritative Internet Wizards’ 1997 Internet Domain Survey (www.nw.com/zone/WWW/top.html), the number of Internet sites has doubled since January 1996, to a total of nearly 20 million hosts.

Presentation

The design and presentation of a marketing site must be of the highest quality, since they must both attract and retain visitors. Internet users have become very discriminating Web “browsers,” and expect well-designed HTML documents and well-designed, quick-to-load images—and if they don’t get this, they will leave! As with television, first impressions really count. Competing for hits amongst a plethora of Web sites, each one newer than the last, a Web site needs to effectively engage the viewer on the very first page.

Once visitors are past the first page, the quality of a site will determine their perception of the accuracy of the information they are reading and of the quality of the company behind it. Thus, the high quality of the site must be maintained throughout—at a marketing site, there is no room for poorly designed pages, broken links, inaccurate material, or stale content.

It is also important to tie the Web site into an existing corporate identity, for example by incorporating existing graphics or logos—suitably processed for the Web—into the pages. It is also important to integrate the Web site into other marketing or advertising media, either by cross-relating the media (e.g., by publishing URLs in print material) or by including print or video-based themes in the Web site. However, it is a mistake to push these relationships too hard, and if the print or video material do not transfer well to an on-line format, it is best to use a design created exclusively for the Web.

Design Tip: Graphics and Fast Downloads

Although the aesthetics of presentation on the Web are crucial just as they are for interactive multimedia on CD-ROMS and for print materials, designing for the Web presents very different technical challenges. Indeed, most commercial graphic and illustration software packages are not designed for this medium and do not work easily with it, while most designers are unfamiliar with the special requirements of Web presentations and graphics. Some of the most important issues were discussed in Chapter 3.

The first challenge is that on the Web, only two graphics formats are widely supported: GIF and JPEG. These formats, not commonly used by graphics designers, dominate the Web because they offer extremely good compression—the image files can be small, even if the images are physically large. The size of the image files is a second major challenge—even with GIF and JPEG, there are many image processing tricks that can be used to produce smaller files. Unfortunately, many print designers are unfamiliar with these tricks. Creating small files is important, as this allows for images that download quickly from server to browser—a consideration that artists working in other media find difficult to understand. This point must be stressed over and over again with the design team, since Internet users repeatedly state that “waiting” is the most frustrating aspect of the Web—and waiting is almost always caused by large, slow-to-download image files.