Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie, let's talk about site design. Let's discuss the basic principles for planning and designing a well laid out site. If you're going to take the time to make a site in Expression Web, let's save a lot of time by just planning ahead. I've made a short list of items and I called this file Website Plan. I'll include it with your work files. You'll be able to actually go into the file and add your own notes for your website. The first thing I do when I create a website is brainstorm. Just grab a piece of paper and start making a list of all the things that you're thinking about for your website. Right down things like article titles, color schemes, pictures that you want to use. The next thing you want to do then is go out and gather sample ideas. Go online, go to some websites and take a look at what they do. Go to some big websites, look at their color schemes, look at where they put their logo. Look at all the options they have for interactions. Where do they place their ads? Take a look at those items. The other thing I would do is simply go to a search engine, something like Google, and type in, if you're making a website about stamps, type that in and go look at other websites that do the same thing that you're wanting to have for your website. Now, the next thing you want to do is actually get into the planning stages. The first element in your planning stage is to come up with your purpose or your goal for your website. Write down you main theme that you want to carry across that people will be able to tell. The second thing is consider your audience. What tone and overall layout do you want to have to reach your audience? In other words, where you want to put your logo, where do you want your navigation. Make sure that you design the layout so that your audience can easily follow it and it reaches the appropriate audience. So if you're going to reach a teenage audience, the layout and the look will be very different than if you're trying to reach the 50's and the 60's age group. The next thing you want to look at are the articles. If you're going to have articles on your website, typically most place have some type of written documentation, decide who's going to create that, how long will it be, what format will it be in. Will you just have it on the basic HTML page or will you provide pdf printable documents? And the other thing on your planning element are your graphics. What types of graphics are you going to use? Are you going to use clipart? Are you going to use photos? Who's going to take the photos? You could go online and buy photos or you could take your own, use your digital camera, scan photos or sometimes people use different shapes and things like that for their graphics. So those are your basic planning elements. The other things you want to think about are ads. Are you going to have advertising space on your website? If you take a look at the big websites, you'll notice sometimes that ads are at the very top. That's a primary placement. Those cost a little more. And then most of the time ads are down the right-hand side if they have them. And then again, typically if they have ads they'll be down at the bottom. So depending upon placement, that's how much they cost. You can decide what you're going to provide and what elements people can have for your website if they want to have ads. And you can work with other website developers and share ads possibly if you want to do it that way. The next thing to look at is your white space. Make sure that when you type up information that you've got enough white space in between the words so people can actually read the documentation. That gives people a place to rest their eye. You'll also notice around the edges there's plenty of white space to show that there's a separation and again, for readability. Logos: make sure you place your logo at the top left-hand corner. That's the typical place where most will be because what that allows people to do is always know how to get back to your home page. Anytime I click the CNN.com logo, I'm automatically back at the beginning. So look at all the big websites. The logo may not be there at the top left at the very beginning, but once you do a search, like in Google, their logo is right here. So if I do a Google search, notice there's the logo at the top left. I click it, I'm back to the main search page. OK. And the last couple of things, discussion areas. Do you want to have a blog? Do you want to have a forum? What type of area do you want to have to have interaction? It could be videos. It could be RSS feeds. It could be a contact form, an email link. Have some way that people can discuss with each other and also with you. And finally, the user usability. Basically you want to design a site that is easily used by everyone. Make sure that you provide alternate text for pictures and we will do that in the following movies. But make sure that your site is easy to ready, easy to understand. If they click a certain area, make sure it's very simple for them to understand that that is where they're going and here is what they're going to see. So make your site simple and easy to use. But take a minute, if you're ready to make your website or a site for someone else, go through the brainstorming process and all the planning stages. It will save you a lot of time once we get started in the actual design of your site.