Initial Planning

When deciding to build a website, start by addressing the following questions:

Why am I building this site?

What do I want this site to accomplish?

Who are my users?

What do my users want this site to accomplish?

In his The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond, Jesse James Garrett describes this stage as the strategy plane. Essentially, your website cannot be successful until you’ve defined what you consider to be success and identified a roadmap for getting there.

Why Am I Building This Site, and What Do I Want to Accomplish with It?

“Because everyone else is doing it” is probably not the best motive for building a website – or at least, not the most clearly articulated motive. It may be true, but it’s not going to help you make any rhetorical decisions. Put together an explicit statement of objectives using a format such as “I am creating this site in order to…” Tell customers about your products to increase sales? Share the recipes you’ve developed to build a reputation online? This decision will drive all of your other decisions going forward, so it’s important to lay it out clearly and in writing, so everyone involved is on the same page and so your founding ideas don’t get diluted or muddied down the line.

Who Are My Users, and What Do They Want This Site to Accomplish?

Your success will be driven by your relationship with your users, so it’s important to tailor your content so that it meets their needs. The first step is to identify who your users are. A site aimed at teenagers may look very different from a site aimed at adults; while you can certainly have more than one user group, it’s still important to identify who is likely to be using your site and what their needs are with regard to issues such as level of familiarity with technology and pre-existing knowledge in your subject areas.

Once you know who your users are, it’s also important to know what they expect from your site. If the users of a recipe website are looking for budget meals, recipes full of expensive ingredients aren’t likely to go over well.

Once you’ve determined your strategy for building the site, you’ll want to identify the scope of the site. Scope refers to the site boundaries; i.e., what the site will do, and also what the site will not do. Garrett breaks scope out into functional specifications (what you want the site to do) and content requirements (what information you want the site to contain). Laying out this information helps keep the site focused and prevents you from wasting time trying to incorporate unrelated or unnecessary features and functions.

As with your objective statement, it’s important to record all of your scope decisions in writing, to ensure consistency over time and among parties.

Once you have a clearly defined strategy and scope, Garrett recommends focusing on what he refers to as the structure phase, which consists of two areas. The first is interaction design, which Garrett defines as “describing possible user behavior and defining how the system will accommodate and respond to that behavior” (81). It’s important to keep a user-centric mindset when designing a site – it may be more difficult to design the site to be user-friendly than it is to ask users to learn how to use the site, but it pays off in the long run. Users of a public website will be quick to give up on your site and find a more intuitive one if you frustrate them too much.

The second aspect of the structure phase is information architecture, or how people process information and how to present information in such a way that people can easily understand and use it (88). According to Garrett, this involves “creating organizational and navigational schemes that allow users to move through site content efficiently and effectively” (89). To make your website user-friendly, you’ll need to identify how users are likely to move through your site and design the layout to facilitate this movement.

The structure phase is followed by the skeleton phase, which involves solidifying decisions related to functionality. Garrett divides the structure phase into three parts. The first is interface design, which Garrett defines as “selecting the right interface elements for the task the user is trying to accomplish and arranging them on the screen in a way that will be readily understood and easily used” (114). Essentially, you should be careful to arrange elements such as buttons, checkboxes, and list boxes in such a way as to make it as easy as possible for the user to accomplish their tasks – and to limit the amount of thinking that the user has to do on their own, because users are not generally looking for a challenge when using a website; they just want to finish their task as painlessly as possible.

The second part, navigation design, relates to making it as easy as possible for users to get from Point A to Point B. As noted, users get frustrated easily, and they may give up on your site altogether if you don’t put together a straightforward, intuitive navigation system.

The third part, information design, relates to ensuring that information is presented in an intuitive manner that makes it easy to grasp.

While it’s important to perform user acceptability testing throughout the website development process, this phase particularly relies on a solid understanding of what your users actually find intuitive and important. What you as the developer think is important and what they as the users think is important may not be the same thing, so even if you’re pressed for time and resources, try to do at least a brief user test; it may save a lot of trouble in the long run.

Once you’ve finished identifying your strategy, scope, structure, and skeleton, it’s time to move on to more design-related concerns. See the Design and Layout section for more information.