So, let’s start at the beginning: what do we want this website to do? Although this seems like an almost stupid question, defining the purpose of the website will affect later choices that you make down the road concerning everything from the content on your site to the colors that you use in your design.
Clearly defining the purpose of website will help you – and your eventual users! – figure out what is important, and will shape how the website acts and looks. A website that tries to do too many things will be ineffective, so try to be as simple as possible.
It seems silly to define that this website is for learning how to make a website, but clearly stating the purpose of the website will help lay a strong basis for all the other decisions that I make regarding my website. Defining the purpose will affect what I put on this site; for example, because this site is about building web sites, I’m not going to put a link to my favorite cupcake shop, or even something slightly more related, like a link to my blog. Even though I like cupcakes – and my blog seems somewhat related because it’s about writing and the web – adding this information here would be tangential to my purpose of showing others how to make a website, and therefore unhelpful to the needs of this particular site.
So, now that we’ve defined the purpose of this website, it’s time to decide who this website is for. So, I’m going to take my example from above and narrow it down a bit.
Again, putting my audience into these simple terms seems really silly, but defining who my audience is makes a difference in what sort of content I put onto my site. Stating that this website is for English majors needing to learn how to make a site makes a difference in not only who will come to my website, but how effective it will be in helping out the people who actually visit my site. If a professional web designer came here, they would probably leave my site not finding anything helpful to them because this site isn’t made with them in mind. My intended audience is not just anyone looking to make a website; but, rather just fellow students who may not know anything about how to create a website and are now learning due to academic pressures. Acknowledging that this specific niche of students is my audience helps me (the creator of the site) decide what information is important to include and what information is better left for a different venue.
Now that we’ve defined what our purpose is and who are intended audience is, it’s time to move on to strategies of implementation for the site itself. You’re probably wondering how I’ve become so knowledgeable about this subject in the past eight weeks (seeing as I’ve never built a website before today in my life); and, most of the rhetorical knowledge is from Jesse James Garrett and his book, The Elements of User Experience. Garrett does a really phenomenal job of synthesizing information about product design in terms of user needs rather than just creator needs, which I’ve found as an effective way to think about web design. 10/10 would highly recommend.
Simply, he phrases product strategy in terms of two questions:
Basically, what do people need from my site and how do I make that happen? Again (I know you’re tired of hearing this), but clearly answering and articulating these questions will save a lot of headache down the road if they are simple and understandable now.
Now, this may seem a bit more complex than the other two examples I have, but I’ve really only expanded my definition of my purpose and my audience by including what I see as their needs and what I can do to provide answers to them. These three foundations that I’ve outlined above are the most important things for my site: I want my users to feel empowered by a practical knowledge of how to make a basic website.
As Garrett says in his book, “The key word here is explicit. The more clearly we can articulate exactly what we want, and exactly what others want from us, the more precisely we can adjust our choices to meet these goals.” – pg. 36.
“Strategy becomes scope when you translate user needs and product objectives into specific requirements for what content and functionality the product will offer to users” (Garrett 57).
So, according to this definition, our next step in web design is to create a set of parameters for our project. If we don’t have specific goals and expectations for our site, then how will we know when it’s finished? It seems a little silly to say it like that, but defining expectations and goals creates a clear sense of purpose for the design.
By including these parameters, I now have a clear sense of when my site will be finished – once I’ve reached all these goals! If I didn’t define them clearly, I might be tempted to constantly shift the function or design of my site – which would probably delay its launch time and its efficacy. As Everett says over and over again, simple and explicit are the best ways to define the purposes, goals, and needs of both the creators and the consumers, so defining the scope of your site will help curb your enthusiasm as you learn new skills for web design!
It’s super easy to get sucked into how we want our websites to look and act before we define what we want them to do or be about; but, having the solid foundation of a clearly defined purpose, audience, strategy, and scope is going to make the building and design processes much easier.
