Planning Your Web Site Story board
Only once a web site is planned is it really possible to start constructing the web pages with Dreamweaver. It is necessary to organise your site before you make your first page since this will save a great deal of time later on. Successful planning will hopefully ensure that all the links will work and the website visitors will be able to easily navigate the web site.
There are many things to work out before the planning can start.
1. Why are you making a web site? What particular need are you addressing? What information do you have, before you create the site. What information do you still need?
2. Who will use your web site? Some reasearch may need to be undertaken into the expected audience of the web site.
3. What browsers will work with your web site? The truthful answer to this is all browsers. The website will need to be tested with as many browsers as possible to ensure the web site looks the same in all of them.
4. Collect the information you want to put on the Web site. Until you have all the information you will have no idea of how many pages
5. Organize the information into topics. Relating and organising data for the site will make good navigation possible.
6. Lay out the topics to create a storyboard, choosing breaks in information as page separators. This will give you an idea of what the structure can look like.
Once this has been worked out then the following can be sorted out.
1. What is the Site structure? How will the information flow from one page to another? This is where the story board – or flowchart or organizational chart- comes in. The easiest way is to draw out a series of linked rectangles in some type of heirachy to layout the site.
2. What will your pages look like? A consistent design theme (backgrounds, colour's, fonts, Cascading style sheets etc.) helps to identify all your web pages. Create a graphic logo or theme to be used on each page of your site.
3. What type of navigation are you going to use? Where will it be positioned, top, side or bottom? Will you use text or graphics or both? What type of graphics will you use? The navigation should allow the users know where they are in your site at all times (breadcrumbs) and should allow the user to return to your home page from any page, however they may have got to that page. The user should be able to search the entire web site ( ideally from every page). The users of the site should be able to provide feedback and be able to find out the author.
Consider for every page
What do I want my users to know here?
What do I want my users to do at this point?
Where do I want my users to go next?
How do I make it easy for them to do that?
Steps for Storyboarding
You should now be able to provide the following information for each page.
A descriptive title
The main heading
The subheadings
The purpose of the page
A description of content
The type of images
A description of the links
For each page you can then create a Storyboard Template
Title: ____________________________________________________
Heading: _________________________________________________
File Name: _______________________________________________
Purpose of Page: __________________________________________
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Text: ______________________________________________
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Sub Headings: ____________________________________________
Proposed Graphics: ________________________________________
Proposed Links: ___________________________________________
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