Starting Your Web Site
Site Content || Page Style || What
to Give Us
Site Content
You are the expert at knowing how your business is organised, and what you want your
customers to find out about. No matter what size your intended site, it pays to think hard about your existing
material and how it is structured.
There are three things to bear in mind:
1. The material you want to put on your web site
2. The pages and organisation of your web site to be.
3. The intended audience of your site
Think about the size of your website. If you have opted for a small or
medium sized web site, the simplest plan might be to group your material into a section for each page - For
example, a toy shop specialising in collectable bears and model cars has opted for a 4 page site. They decide
on a home page, a bear page and a car page, with an enquiry page that also says a bit more about the people behind
the shop.
If your business is clearly divided into a number of key areas, it might be a
good idea to have a page for each area. If your business has previously promoted a series of one-off
products, it might be a good idea to think about how they might be grouped to make sense to visitors.
Your intended audience is very important: If the toy shop wanted to appeal to
children, we might use lots of very bright colours and pictures, without too much text - cartoons and characters
might be important, while contact details are less important because a child is less likely to email or phone up
the shop. If the toy shop wanted to appeal to adult toy collectors, we might use a lot of detailed
information to emphasise the shops expertise, with a few exemplar photographs of very high quality, and the contact
page would be very important to cater for specialist enquiries.
Page Style
We will work from any existing promotional material or stationary you have. If
you have used a variety of styles, it's a good idea to let us know which ones you have liked best and why. We
would like to know:
1. Logos
- Do you always use the same logo on the top left - or do you have a
series of logos, that are placed anywhere on the page?
2. Corporate colours
- Do you always print with blue text onto onto cream? Do
you have a very precise idea of what tone of blue is used?
3. Layout
- Is your material always left aligned with a coloured strip to the
right of each page?
4. Are there other websites whose style has impressed you?
- Not just the
flashey graphics, but the overall layout and presentation of the site. If so, let us know - It will give us
an idea or the kind of design you are after.
What to Give Us
The more material you can give us, the better. We might not be able to put
everything on the site, but we don't want to miss out something by mistake.
The following checklist might help:
- Brochures
/ Leaflets
- Original
artwork
- Stationary
(letter headings, business cards)
- Original
Photographs (products, premises, people…)
- Computer
Files (graphics or textual -
please check that we will be able to read them!)
- Site
Ideas/Plans (If you have made notes or drawn up some of your ideas)
- Important
documents (EG, order forms, mission statements?)
- Other
Material
P.S.
We are very happy to work with you to find the best solution for your website.
However, you can help us to design your site in the minimum of time by...
1. Giving us a clear and simple understanding of how the information you supply
should be organised and grouped.
2. Giving us all the material you want us to use in one batch.
3. Letting us know if you already have a definite idea of how you would like your pages to be styled.
