Site Planning Aids the Design Process
About a year and a half ago I got involved in putting together a website for a church as part of some community service requirements. Upon beginning the project I asked a few basic questions, the majority of them based on how they would like the website to look and so on. I did touch on a few areas about what the goals of the website were, and no one seemed to know.
Looking back now I realize that I should have pressed the issue further or taken Karen Morrill-McClure’s advice from the blog Creating a Site Plan. The only problem was, at the time I started working on this web site I had no idea what Information Architecture was and had certainly not heard of, or read, anything about her.
To say the least the implementation of the website was a disaster. We had no goals for the site, so therefore I had no direction in the site’s design. I coded some pages aimlessly changing approaches and design ideas daily until I realized that I was getting nowhere. Even though I finally settled on a design and built 8 or 9 pages based on it, it was still far from a working site. There was no content since there was no goal for the site, and a page without content is absolutely worthless. Since my “client” did not know why or what they needed a site for, and I didn’t know a tactic for extracting that information from them, the web site was never 100% complete.
Just so that I could return a finished product to them, I copied content from a few of their brochures to put up on the pages and called it quits with a final, “If you decide that you would like anything else to go up on this site after you have had a chance to look it over, please feel free to give me a call.”
After taking Information Architecture and reading this article I realize now that I should never have even begun to work on a site without a solid set of goals and a plan in mind. This is absolutely the most important part of a design project, because without it you can get turned around and lost in a project before you even know it. Having a plan before-hand gives you something on paper, something tangible, that you are working towards. As well as some guidelines to work off of when you come upon a design related decision. Even though it seems like boring work and may feel like it’s taking up too much of your time, it will certainly save time and expense in the long run.
I had not thought of the story of the church website quagmire in a long time, maybe it was just one of those life experiences you would just rather block out. After thinking about it while writing this I decided to stop by the website and see how it was doing but the URL is no longer working. I guess there probably was never much of a need for the website to start with, which is something that I would have known from the beginning if I had taken the proper steps during the research and planning phase. Oh well, you live and you learn.
Katie said,
January 21, 2009 at 12:13 am
I know exactly what you mean. After Info. Archit. its like “How was I able to do anything without a criteria?” I usually plan ahead so everything is usually in my head and never really put anything down on paper. I actually avoid putting anything down on paper. Now I have to make outlines of what I have to do next and what goes where, etc. Thank God for wireframes too cause its just fun to come up with templates.
Mary Ann Byerly said,
January 21, 2009 at 10:34 am
As painful as it sounds that was a great learning experience for you. Luckily we don’t have to put all of our work in our portfolio. Also if they were a paying customer they may have worked harder at helping you accomplish a better website. I saw your mock website in IA and I remember I voted for yours. Look ahead becasue you are going to have a good future in web design.
airimpact said,
January 22, 2009 at 10:37 pm
“Oh well, you live and you learn”, nice
One thing I have come to learn is, don’t forget that sometimes you need to educate the client about what is going on, I find myself doing more and more educating my clients in all sorts of areas. I have to do this constantly with my airbrush work and I have a strange feeeling it will be the same with web-design. Dude building that site must have been a bit stressful and being for community service.
rmspencer said,
February 23, 2009 at 10:15 pm
i found the insights from this assignment to be very helpful. reading the page really helped answer some questions that i had in creating the business statement . the reading helped make my ideas flow a lot easier
BlindAcre said,
August 31, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Site Maps are very important. They can sometimes be a challenge, but they work great when organizing content. It is also helpful to get all of the content from a client as soon as possible.