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Guidelines for individuals and organisations planning to put up a Website

This purpose of this document is to provide information to help businesses and organisation to set up their own websites.

Some questions you will need to consider include:

A bit of thought and participation at an early stage is essential. If you know why you want a Web site and have a good idea of who it is you are trying to attract to your site - then you are already further along the road than most web design hopefuls.

The answer to the questions will have a significant impact on the design of the site.

Develop a clear purpose for the Web site.

You must know your purpose in order to communicate it well to others. When someone visits your Web site they should know instantly what your site is about and whether or not it meets their particular needs.

It is clear from even a cursory surf around the Web that many Web site developers have not considered this basic question. In the 24 hours prior to updating this page I have come across two extreme examples of this 'non-approach'. One of the Web sites I could tell was about a conference, there where photographs of evening social events and visiting speakers - but no clue as to what the conference was about. And just to confuse matters further the site had a cryptic name which might have been chosen just throw me of the scent.

The other Web site consisted entirely of ten graphics all of which looked like advertisements. There was no obvious indication what the site was about or where to click to find out more. Needless to say I didn't linger long enough to make an inspired guess as to what it was for.

Why are they coming to your site? If you look at some Web sites, you'd presume that the answer is "User is extremely bored and wishes to stare at a blank screen for several minutes while a flashing icon loads, then stare at the flashing icon for a few more minutes." Philip Greenspun (Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing)

You may have more than one purpose for your Web site, but to start with it is best to have a clear focus by having just one primary aim - you can add more later. If you feel this in not appropriate you should try to rank your goals in order of importance.

To focus your mind try, If possible, try to sum up the purpose of the Web site in a single paragraph. If you succeed this paragraph may end up as the openning one on your home page.

To come up with a single paragraph encapsulating (a) who you are and (b) what the site is for, tends to be a very difficult goal to achieve. If it proves to be easy that is usually an indication that no real discussion has been entered into and that the paragraph is probably the product of one person. John Shiple in his 'Information Architecture' article suggests that it might be a good idea to arrange a formal meeting, with an agenda and questions, with the sole aim of creating a definition of the goals of your site.

You may also want to consider short and long term goals. In the short term you may be in a rush to get something up and running - but some thought as to how the site might develop in the future could save you a lot of time and heartache as new demands and needs arise, e.g if you start out with very narrow categories and each time you add information you find yourself having to create new categories, the structure of you site could soon start to look messy.

Define your audience

Which group of people is your web site aimed at? Who will be interested in the information or service that you will be providing?

Once you have a clear idea of the audience you are aiming to attract, you need to ask the following questions:

Try to put yourself in their shoes - get inside their heads.

You should write down both the type of people you are aiming your Web site at and their interests, needs, and concerns etc. Why do you think they will feel rewarded by visiting your site? You should also try to rank the relative importance of the needs of your audience.

Listing and then ranking the interests of potential visitors should help to define first, what should be on the Web site and second, what needs to be 'right up front' or deeper within the hierarchy of the Web site.

A good idea is to invent scenarios or stories to investigate what a particular user's needs might be and how they would use the site to fulfill those needs. For example: if the aim of your site is to support existing customers think of a typical task that a person who has bought your product or service, might want to carry out using your Web site. One scenario might be someone looking for instructions for a particular product because they have lost the manual.

What's going to be on your Web site

Having clarified your goals and got a good idea of your intended audience you can now think about the content of your Web site. The content should flow logically from the agreed site goals and audience's needs. This is the opposite of what usually happens when a business decides to put up a Web site. In a large number of cases businesses think about how the Web site will look first, they think about the content second and lastly (if at all) the needs of potential users'. Typically such sites look good, perhaps contain information like the management structure of the organisation and who is in charge of what, and perhaps have some interactive games or chat rooms. The problem with such sites is that the only people interested in the content are the people who built the site or who are featured on its pages.

Using the information you have about your audiences needs make a list of all the information you think should be included on the site and start to organise this content. Think about how you might organise this information on tour site. You may want to draw the structure out on paper or write each content idea on a card and then collate your cards into piles of related content. Your list of content should include everything you think should be included on your site including interactive functions such as guestbooks, bulletin boards, mailing lists and any other services that you think will be useful to your audience.

Try out different stuctures and compare and contrast their strengths and weaknesses. As the major sections of your site start to emerge give them descriptive names.

Develop an approach

You may have all the information that your audience is interested in but if your approach is wrong they will not hang around long enough to find it. The essence of a good approach: focus on your audience's concerns - not your own.

If your text is full of the pronouns 'me' and 'we', rather than 'you', then you don't have the right approach and you will you appear to be less concerned with your audience than yourself. So emphasize the 'you'.

You should be addressing your audience's most important interests or concerns. For example if they are seeking assistance - what is troubling them? and what topics flow from these concerns?- what assistance, information, resources will be useful?

Don't treat the Web as an adjunct to your off-line activities

Your Web site should stand alone - don't think of the Web as an advertisement for your off-line activities - provide the full service on-line. Don't tell people of the great documents and articles you can send them by post, provide the full text of those documents on the site so that your visitors can read or print them themselves. Don't ask visitors to your site to phone for further information, by the time a potential customer is off-line they will have forgotten all about you and your product or service - remember e-mail is the natural way of communicating on the Web.

Design Your Website

The most important thing about your Web site is not how it looks but whether it serves the intended purpose. Are you addressing your audience's needs, are you making it easy for users to find the information they are looking for?

The information you have gathered up to this point should have given you a good idea of how your Web site is going to be structured and what sections there are going to be on the site. You also need to make decisions in relation to whether you would like to design it as a 'shallow' or 'deep' Web site i.e. will there be a link to everything on the front page or will you devide your information into categories - and continue to sub-divide those categories as people burrow down into your site.

It is probably a good idea to create a text only version of your site first and explore different ways of arranging your content. Thus you can thoroughly test out your site structure before commissioning an expensive graphic designer.

How much time can be committed to the site?

Before putting up a Web site you need to think about how much time you can afford to put into maintaining it, publicising it, updating it, answering e-mails etc. If the information on your Web site hasn't been updated for months visitors will be suspicious of the credibility and accuracy of all the information on your site.

The time and effort put in could range from a few hours a month to a few hours a day - or (if you get hooked) it could become the main focus of your life filling every minute and hour you have!

Promoting your Web site

The Web site you put up will have to be promoted if you expect any visitors. There are a number of ways to advertise your site. First it is essential that you add your site to the major search engines: Yahoo, Hotbot, Infoseek, Excite, Lycos, and Altavista. The most important of these search engines - and the hardest to get listed on is Yahoo. Yahoo is, strictly speaking, a directory rather than a search engine. Search engines are giant databases which automatically index huge amounts of Web sites. Directories on the other hand tend to be lists of Web sites chosen be real people and then put into appropriate cagegories. Because Yahoo has hundreds of requests every day and has real people looking at every site, it can take a long time to get listed. A good strategy is to re-submit your site every two to three months - for as long as it takes. Many Directories and Search engines are starting to charge for listings. The most open ones state this fact as part of their submission procedure - usually by saying that you will be added to the search engine/directory quicker if you pay the fee. Others are more secretive and rely on 'those in the know' spreading the word that you only get listed if you pay ( naming no names - but there is one large directory service that does this for sure). Find relevant news groups and mailing lists and announce your site there. Become, if you have time, an active participant on these lists/news groups and point out when possible that relevant information can be found on your site.

Put your Web and e-mail address on all of your publicity material. I am amazed how often organisations fail to take this simple but valuable step after paying good money to get a Website up and running.

Put your e-mail signature to good use by adding a link and a short description of your Web site.

If you are successful at advertising your site it will probably start to generate some e-mail for you to answer - that's going to add to the time you need to put aside towards maintaining your Web site.

Create an Accessible Web Site

The Web site you create should be accessible by everyone - if it is not - not only will you be discriminating against a portion of your audience but you will be losing out yourself because the potential number of visitors is decreased. It is estimated that the percentage of disabled people in many populations is between 10% and 20%. Access to information will not be a problem for all of these people but it will be for many.

If you are building the Web site yourself your HTML should conform to the World Wide Web Consortiums Web Accessibility Guidelines which are at http://www.w3.org/WAI/. If you are writing the HTML by hand conforming to the guidelines should not be a problem but if you decide to use a Web authoring tool try to ensure that it is capable of producing accessible Web sites.

If you enlist the help of a commercial design agency you should ask them if they have experience of creating accessible Web sites and to give you the addresses of some examples.

ScotConnect specialises in the creation of accessible, easy to use and easy to maintain Web sites so if you are looking for a company with a track record in this area we would be happy to hear from you. I have created a set of guidelines for creating accessible Web sites at http://www.connections.gcal.ac.uk/jimsguid/.

Useful Links

Examples of Purpose and Audience statements

The Centre for Independent Living in Glasgow (http:cil.gcal.ac.uk):

Purpose:
Information about Independent Living and Employing a Personal Assistant.
Audience:
Disabled People and service providers who would like information about employing a personal assistant.

Web page design for designers:

Purpose:
'The purpose of this site is not to teach people how to produce web pages. There is little mention of HTML or any other technical stuff other than in passing. It is assumed that the reader already has a grasp of HTML programming, or has made the decision to use one of the new WYSIWYG web page editors. It is aimed at people who are already involved with design and typography for conventional print and want to explore the possibilities of this new electronic medium."
Audience:
Designers who now want to design for the World Wide Web

Jonathan Tward's Multimedia Medical Reference Library (http:www.med-library.commitment/medlibraryl)

Purpose:
a resource of medical-related information
Audience:
people interested in finding out about medical conditions.
Much of this information I have learned from Bryan Pfaffenbergers book "The Elements of Hypertext Style", Philip Greenspuns web site The Web Tools Review and the Information Architecture Tutorial by John Shiple.

This is a modified version of an article I first published on the Connections Disability Web site. (http://www.connections.gcal.ac.uk/)


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