Website Production

Producing a successful website involves several stages:

  Identify keywords. Think how a user will try to find your site from a search engine. Look at the competition and use a tool like wordtracker. Knowing the keywords you are trying to target will help you structure your site and give you a vocabulary of terms you should emphasize when you write the copy.

  Identify the content and structure. Script all the major pages in a Word document. You will then be able to create a site map and identify major and minor menu headings. Doing this at this stage benefits the design and save reworking the design later.

  Create the design. A professional graphic designer will take in to account your corporate identity and ideas you have for the look and feel. Identifying existing websites that you like can give you a starting point for your own ideas.

  Identify images to go with the script. Good quality images bring a page to life.

  Create templates so the site is easy to maintain. Break the design into its separate HTML text or graphic regions. Larger image may need to cut into a jig-saw of smaller images.

  Build dynamic elements such as menus and rollovers buttons. Rollovers change when you mouse over them.

  Create a style sheet to define font name, size and colour. Use of style sheets ensures consistency throughout the site. Consider users with impaired vision by using relative font sizes that can be adjusted.

  Create and populate pages - cut and paste text from the script and existing docs.

  Crop and resize images to fit within the template.

  Link to other sites.

  Optimise pages to obtain higher search engine rankings. Factors such as title, prominence, keyword density, alt and link text are all examined by search engines .

  Create downloadable documents from existing word documents by creating pdf versions. Examples include user manuals or application forms that needs to be printed.

  Program web applications. For example:

Examples of websites and costs >>