Anybody who runs a website will be faced at one time or another to redesign his site. I have myself tried my hand at redesigning this site with varying degrees of success - though you can plainly see that there is a lot of scope for improvement.
But does designing websites require following a series of pre-charted steps ? Or is it a process which require little if any planning - one where you just jump in and start modifying the code ?
It appears that most, beautifully designed websites are the result of careful planning and forethought. Designing websites can be divided into 9 separate steps. Them being :
- Know what you're doing.
- Know what the site needs to do.
- Know what the site's visitors want.
- Get a good picture of the personality and style of the web site.
- Sketch out highly successful scenarios.
- Organise views into a site map.
- Sketch the essential features & look - This is the time you use a graphics software such as Gimp. But using only pen and paper is also equally effective.
- Map your visitors' attention.
- Arrange the visual elements to work together.
You can read the details of each step at this well written article at Web design from scratch - a beautiful site with good articles pertaining to web design.
And if you are wondering which is a good book to pick up the essential skills in XHTML, CSS and Javascript which are pre-requisites for mastering the art of web design - I would highly recommend you check out the book Web Design in a Nutshell which is well into its third edition having sold over 200,000 copies so far.
1 comments:
Then may I suggest an improvement? ;-) Make links more distinguishable from ordinary text, for it's hard to tell where one can click in the text, at least on my LCD display it is.
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