Conceptual Foundations

Why exactly do you want a web site ? The scale and seriousness of your web design effort will be determined by the answers to this questions. And this will impact many of the implementation decisions, such as whether you need professional graphics design or whether you can do it yourself, or even reuse images and icons found elsewhere.

To help clarify these issues, you may find it helpful to write a media kit first. Here, you try to describe your site's purpose as succinctly as possible - as you would, say, for a press release. Open with a paragraph that would be suitable for the short description required by the directories where you will be submitting your site for listing. Go on to expand on the key concepts and subdivisions of your site. Have others proof read it and check for spelling, grammar, clarity, impact, etc. This page can become the template for further work.

You should also begin thinking about how you will measure the success of your web site in meeting the stated goals. One obvious measure will be traffic, in terms of page hits or visitor count. But all the traffic in the world wide web will be useless if your visitors don't buy your products or come back or give whatever response you are looking for. Try to make your site interactive enough so that you can gauge your audience's response to your site.

A detailed profile of your intended target audience is indispensable. What do you expect them to get out of your site ? How mature are they ? What's their educational background ? Are they poor students or affluent business professionals ? What web access facilities are they likely to have ?

It's critical to match the design and implementation of your web site to your target audience's needs, expectations, and capabilities. Large corporate sites such as Sun and Digital are catering to relatively sophisticated computer and Internet users, many of whom will be influential in decisions to purchase computer products. Their sites had better impress rather than disappoint ! But the resources that have been devoted to creating these sites would be massive overkill for a simple personal home page.

You might assume that, to a first approximation, your target audience consists of people not entirely dissimilar to yourself. But beware of treating them as clones. Allow for the possibility that they might be color-blind, or visually impaired, or they might not share your mother-tongue, or they might not have the same kind of computer and monitor as you. Aim for the lowest common denominator first, and field test your prototypes with as wide a variety of "guinea-pigs" as you can muster. Later you can add the 'cool' stuff, continually testing for audience response.

As the designer of a Web site, you must look at the site from the user's point of view, not just the information manager's perspective. You must identify good ways for users to structure or classify the information space.

Metaphor refers mainly to the mental model that users create of your site - but often it will be a reflection of your site's file structure. Typical metaphors include libraries, books, supermarket aisles, desktops, TV channels, maps, VCRs - any way that people are familiar with for structuring information.

You might show 'areas' on your homepage, but underneath it's still just a jumble of files in the root directory. And if you haven't thought about your directory structure, you haven't thought about your URL structure, your addressing scheme - your conceptual space. And if you haven't thought about it, your user's won't find it.

According to the Yale C/AIM Web Style Guide, your Web site will not function well without a solid and logical organizational backbone, even if your basic content is accurate and well-written. The four basic steps in organizing your information are to

• divide it into logical units,
• establish a hierarchy of importance and generality,
• use the hierarchy to structure relationships among chunks,
• then analyze the functional and aesthetic success of your system.

Hierarchical organization imposes a useful discipline on your own analytical approach to your content, as hierarchies only work well when you have thoroughly organized your material. I recommend putting a lot of effort into designing a logical system based on the user's view - rather than say, departmental structure, though that might play a role. Your navigation system should then be able to take advantage of the file structure, and good keywords will appear in the URLs themselves, helping users figure it out..

See the Navigation section for several illustrations of navigational mechanisms. I've laid out some of the principles that went into the structural design of this site. Many of them should be generally applicable to other content-rich information sites.

Many people have difficulty grasping abstract information spaces. Those who are best at it tend to be programmers who often don't comprehend or sympathise that most of the user population lacks spatial skills and has difficulty understanding the structure. One way to resolve that is to make the structure visual and explicit rather than something that people have to build up as a mental model. An overview map can be very helpful to your users.