SETTING YOUR GOALS

 What do you want people to be able to accomplish on your web site? Are your visitors looking for specific information on how to do something? Are they going to read through each page in turn, going on only when they’re done with the page they’re reading? Are they just going to start at your home page and wander aimlessly around, exploring your world until they get bored and go somewhere else?

Suppose that you’re creating a website that describes the company where you work. Some people visiting that website might want to know about job openings. Others might want to know where the company actually is located. Still others might have heard that your company makes technical white papers available over the net, and they want to download the most recent version of a particular paper.  Each of these goals is valid, so you should list each one.

For a shopping catalog website, you might have only a few goals: to enable your visitors to browse the items you have for sale by name or price , and to order specific items after they’re done browsing.

For a personal or special-interest website, you might have only a single goal: to enable your visitors to browse and explore the information you’ve provided.

If you’re designing web pages for someone else—for example, if you’re creating the website for your company or if you’ve been hired as a consultant – having a set of goals for the should have before you create a single page. The ideas you have for the website might end up doing a lot of work than has to be thrown away.

BREAKING UP YOUR CONTENT INTO MAIN TOPICS

With your goals in mind, try to organize your content into main topics or sections. Chunking related information together under a single topic. Sometimes the goals you came up with in the preceding section and your list of topics will be closely related for example, if you’re putting together a web page for a bookstore, the goal of being able to order books fits nicely under a topic called, appropriately, “ordering books”.

You don’t have to be exact at this point to development. Your goal here is just to try to come up with an idea of what. Specifically, you’ll be describing in your web pages. You can organize the information better later, as you write the actual pages.

Suppose that you’re designing a website about how to tune up your car. This example is simple because tune-up consists of a concrete sat of steps that fit neatly into topic headings. In this example, your topics might include the following:

·         Change the oil and oil filter

·         Check and adjust engine timing

·         Check and adjust valve clearances

·         Check and replace the spark plugs

·         Check fluid levels, belts, and hoses

Don’t worry about the order of the steps or how you’re going to get your visitors to go from one section to another. Just list the points you want to describe in your website.

How about a less task-oriented example? Suppose that you want to create a set of web pages about a particular rock band because you’re a big fan, and you’re sure other fans would benefit from your extensive knowledge. Your topics might be as follows:

·         The history of the band

·         Biographies of each of the bad members

·         A discography all the albums and singles the band has released

·         Selected lyrics

·         Images of album covers information about upcoming shows and future albums

You can come up with as many topics as you want, but try to keep each topic reasonably short. Short .if a single topic seems too large, try to break it up into subtopics. If you have too many small topics, try to group them together into a more general topic heading. For example, if you’re creating an online encyclopedia of poisonous plants, having individual topics for each plant would be overkill. You can just as easily group each plant name under a letter of the alphabet (A,B,C, A and so on) and use each letter as a topic. That’s assuming, of course, that your visitors will be looking up information in your encyclopedia alphabetically. If they want to look up poisonous plants by using some other method, you’d need to come up with another system of organization as well.

Your goal is to have a set of topics that are roughly the same size and that group together related bits of information you have to present.

IDEAS FOR ORGANIZATION AND NAVIGATION

At this point, you should have a good idea of what you want to talk about as well as a list of topics. The next step is to actually start structuring the information you have into a set of web pages. Before you do that, however, consider some standard structures that have been used in other help systems and online tools. This section describes some of these structures, their various features, and some important considerations, including the following:

·         The kinds of information that work well for each structure

·         How visitors find their way through the content of each structure type to find what they need

·         How to make sure that visitors can figure out where they are within your documents (context) and find their way back to a known position as you read this section, think about information might fit into one of these structures or how you could combine these structures to create a new structure for you website.