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How To Design a Successful Site
part 1: Organization

Contributed by James Hold    Sep 9, 2004
James is eVerity's President and Lead Account Manager.

90% of the time you spend designing your site should be in the planning stage. Don't make the mistake of starting with a home page and then seeing where it goes or "playing it by ear." If you do this, it will be hard to go back and make changes later on. You have to start with the big picture, and take everything into consideration before you do anything technical. You can use a pencil and paper if you want. Designing is no different than cooking. You have to have the right equipment, the recipe, and all the ingredients. If you decide to worry about these things after you've already started cooking, it will be too late.

There are a number of factors to consider before you start. How you design your site, and how you word the text, is going to have an effect on your rankings in search engines. (check the marketing section for more on this.) What is the best way to appeal to your target audience? This will affect everything from background colors to graphics and text. What is the primary objective of your site? As an information resource or advertising medium? To communicate to your customers? To sell? Most sites are a combination of all the above, but if you know which is most important, you'll have a better idea of how to proceed.

Make a comprehensive list of all the features you could possibly need. In the end, you may not use all of them, but its important to consider the possibilities. Will you need to accept credit cards? Use forms to collect user feedback? Utilize an online discussion forum? Provide an account login area?

Finally, consider your budget. If you want a good site, it isn't going to be free. Even if you are designing it yourself, a good site may utilize advanced features in the form of installed software or extra hosting features. Remember to budget for marketing after your site is ready to launch. Can you come up with a total dollar amount that you are able to spend on hosting/design for the first year? (be reasonable here)

Create an Outline

A quick review of how to make an outline:
I. Main Idea 1
  A. Subtopic 1
  B. Subtopic 2
    1. First Detail
    2. Second Detail
II. Main Idea 2

Take a few hours to think about all the information you want to put on your site. Start by categorizing it into between 3 and 10 main ideas. For each main idea, think of all the information that would relate to it, and categorize that information into subtopics. Then, for each subtopic, go ahead and write down all the details. If some of those details can be further combined into subgroups, please do so.

While creating your outline, look at it from the perspective of the people visiting your site who may not be experts in your field. For example, there are 9 main ideas on this site. Those are not the best way to categorize everything eVerity has to offer from a technical perspective, but we have found those work the best for helping new customers navigate our site.

Remember the "rule of 3." People don't read your site the way you write it. They scan quickly through, and invariably miss most of what you are saying. Studies have shown that the rule of 3 is the best way to get your message across on the web. Three headings, three paragraphs, three sentences per paragraph, etc. You won't be able to do this 100% of the time, but you should try to do so as much as possible.

Finally, don't get wordy. Look for items that repeat themselves. If you find that you can only come up with one detail for a subtopic, then maybe that whole subtopic belongs under a different heading.

Create a Site Map

Now that you have an outline to organize all the information on your site, the next step is to use the outline to create a list (map) of all the pages that you will need. Again, there is a "Three Click Rule" here, which states that no page on your site should be more than three clicks from your home page.

Start with your home page. Each of your main headings should be 1 click away from your home page, subheadings not more than two clicks, and all details there after not more than three clicks. If you can put details and subheadings on the main headings page, please do so. Just try to make sure each individual page on your site is not longer than one or two screens. Studies show that people rarely scroll down to look for information, so keep the important stuff at the top.

Once your information has been organized into pages, you need to come up with a title for each of these pages. A title is not a headline. It is a label that you will use in your navigational scheme. It needs to be short and intuitive, not catchy. I should be able to read your title, and know exactly what is going to be on that page.

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