The Beginning of your Website Project
The first stage of creating and building your new website starts even before you pass your specifications to us. This article is here to explain the strategies and techniques that will make this preparation phase straightforward and effective. The information that will be generated by following these guidelines provides the building blocks from which we can create a site that will look and function as you want it to.
The overview described in this document is supplemented by more detailed explanations of separate aspects of the process found by following the relevant links.
We recommend that you read through each of these pages, in order, then go and think about, explore and research the answers to the questions they contain. Consider the needs of your business, talk to colleagues and friends, review other websites. Then print out the PDF which has a resume of the questions - old fashioned pen and paper can still be effective tools for recording ideas. Write some of yours on the print-out and have it ready for discussion with your Webascent Guide. We then use this information to build a Site Proposal. Thorough preparation makes the process a lot more efficient and enables our designers fully to understand your requirements.
The Webascent CORE Website
Even if you have in mind a more complex site with various add-ons (e-commerce, for example) it keeps this part of the process more coherent if you focus on the Webascent CORE. The CORE acts as the base from which the website will be able to grow, both in the immediate term with the add-ons that you need from the outset, and in the longer term, as your business grows.
The Webascent CORE site comprises the main body of the whole website to which additional functions can be added if required. It will number up to about 20 web pages, divided probably into 2 or 3 different types of page in terms of how they are laid out. In other words, the "Intro" page will have a specific layout, and then there will be main category pages and sub-category pages each with their own version of the layout.
Preparation Overview
There are three main areas that need to be prepared at this stage :-
Your Objectives
What exactly do you need to achieve from having a website? Both the looks of the website and the way that it functions and navigates are influenced by its purpose. But it's a big question — click here for a set of questions and guidelines that will help focus and refine your answer.
The "Look and Feel" of the website.
This section is about colour schemes and design features.
Categories
This is about the way that the website is organised. What information do the pages, in their different sections and sub-sections, need to convey?