Green Hectares Rural Tech Workshop – Website Planning

Editor's Notes

• #2: - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Welcome to Website Planning - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Participants will learn to understand and create a purpose for their website and develop a diagram of the pages, links and content. *Instructor notes will be distinguished by italics *Instructor should have a graphics and web development background. Although it isn’t absolutely necessary the students have computers or Internet Connectivity, the instructor should for demonstration purposes. As this workshop is a lot of lecture, using this PowerPoint presentation as a learning tool may help students learn. Make sure the following are installed / updated: Internet Explorer Other requirements: Internet Connection (High Speed preferred) Sticky Notes *This course should be taught by a person with a graphics /web development background.
• #5: Think of your website as a building or a home. The site architecture is the architecture of your building, and the room furnishings are your content. You will need to set up the framework for your building before you can fill your building’s rooms. Also, the purpose of each room will affect how you plan the over all structure. A swimming pool wouldn’t be designed with the same intent as a firehouse or a condominium; and a website to share family photos would be designed differently than a website that sells shoes.
• #6: Identifying your site’s goals is a great way to streamline the beginning stages of website planning. If you know what your website’s goals are, it’s easier to plan how to build the site’s structure.
• #7: *Ask participants to identify their site’s goals . Depending on the goals of one’s site, its design and planning will be different. If you’re interested in selling online, you need to consider product, exchanging tender, and security options to protect both you and your buyers. If you’re interested in showcasing multimedia, you’ll want to incorporate music players, or videos players. If you’re interested in updating your website frequently, incorporating a blog into your website plan would be a terrific way to direct users to new information without having to sift through your entire site for updates. If this is a site to stay in touch with your friends and family, then a blog is most likely a perfect way to communicate quickly and keep your family in the loop! If this is a site for educating users on a specific topic, its design probably won’t need to be flashy or incorporate multimedia – its content will be the focus. *Have a list of websites available to visit to visually explain the differences.
• #8: Your target audience is the selection of users that will find your site most useful and informative. It is so helpful to keep your audience in mind while you plan your site so that you can cater to their needs as users.
• #9: To determine your target audience, think of who is most likely to benefit from the information you will be posting on your site. Is it children? Family members? Think of age, location, interests, culture. Different demographics of people will use the Internet differently. If you are building a site for an older generation who is just beginning to use the Internet, it is best to make your site clear and easy to navigate. If you are building a site that is focused on teenagers, the content needs to be written to best communicate with them. When catering to the needs of your users, it is important to put yourself in their shoes and try to imagine what it would be like searching for your site and then browsing through it. What kind of information are your users going to find important?
• #10: Content can also be thought of as the furnishings in each room of a house or building.
• #11: As it’s often said “Content is King”. Visuals can impair the flow of your site if they are irrelevant or misplaced. Don’t let flashy visuals impede how you display your information. Organize the most important information prominently, so your audience can find it easily. This is best placed on the home page of your site. Always keep your target audience in mind. If it were turned around and you were searching for the information found on the site you’re planning to build, how would you like it organized? What would you like to see first? How would you like to see information displayed?
• #12: Search for sites online that offer similar services/information to that which you are planning to incorporate into your own website. If you are interested in starting an online bike store, search for local stores online. If you are looking to set up a fashion blog, checking out existing fashion blogs will give you a terrific idea of how blogs are usually executed. Look for good ideas that you can incorporate into your own website, but don’t forget to think about how you can make improvements to previous designs. This will give your site an advantage over other sites. *If you have computer/internet access, have your participants do an online search for businesses/blogs/sites that would be relevant to the site they are planning to create. If your students do not have internet access, feel free to ask them which sites would be relevant to their potential website and go through the steps of searching for a few with the class to make this portion of the workshop more interactive.
• #13: Site architecture refers only to the hierarchy and organization of content within your website. It is separate from your site’s aesthetic design, graphics, and text. *You may want to have a site map already created for a website to explain visually how a map becomes a website.
• #14: If you can’t concisely explain why a page is going to be useful to someone, exclude it from your site plan. Not everything has to take up a separate page. Some information can be categorized to fit on similar pages.
• #15: The goals of your website will affect the style that you choose to implement. Photo-heavy sites will need plenty of room to display images or a photo viewer; whereas blogging sites will have the majority of their online space dedicated to text.
• #16: Showcase websites are terrific for incorporating style and flare into the aesthetics of your website. They are perfect for illustrators or filmers to exhibit their work. *Be prepared to show the students some great examples of showcase Blog and eCommerce sites. Also take them to some poorer examples.
• #17: Blogs are terrific for getting information on the web fast . They are nearly always free to sign up, and incredibly intuitive. They usually incorporate an informal writing style/design, and are typically very easy to update, which make them well suited for journals or as a forum to keep friends and family in the loop with day-to-day happenings. Many people use blogs when they go travelling to keep an online record of their travels while abroad. Most blogging sites will offer a wide range of visual themes for you to select to give your blog more personality.
• #18: Blogger and Wordpress are free; however, Typepad charges a fee to register with their site.
• #19: Selling online allows users to browse your shop online and purchase from any location. You customers can be from almost anywhere.
• #20: Selling online allows users to browse your shop online and purchase from any location in the world with Internet access. With electronic commerce, you have the option of building a store inside your website via products like Wazala (http://www.wazala.com) which allows users to buy directly on your website, or you can use a site such as eBay to sell goods. eBay (http://www.ebay.com) is an auction-style website that is easy and inexpensive to use for buying and selling. One issue that needs to be addressed while engaging in e-commerce is that of identity theft and payment security. PayPal (http://www.paypal.com) is a terrific resource that keeps your banking information and that of your buyer safe, confidential, and secure. It is quite common for sellers to use Paypal in conjunction with eBay.
• #21: Planning the structure of one’s website is hugely important. Without a clear plan about how the website will be organized and function, it will take the creator longer to post information online, make it difficult for users to find the information they need, and make it harder for the site to accomplish its goals. *Take some time during the workshop to have participants break their content into manageable groups, labelled and separated for future use.
• #22: It is crucial to place the most essential content of your site in prominent places, like the home page. This is the first place users will search for what they need. The more times a user has to click away from the home page to find what they are looking for, the less likely they are to stay on your website.
• #23: .
• #24: You don’t have to be a web developer or a designer to create a site map! Most people sketch our their web plan on a piece of paper to get an idea of how their site will appear; but if you decided to add or delete pages, it can mean a lot of erasing and starting afresh. One of the best methods to develop a site map is to write down the name of each desired webpage on a small piece of paper and shuffle the pieces around until you’ve created a final site map that will allow users to navigate smoothly through your website’s hierarchy of pages and information. *It is highly recommended that you provide post-it notes , paper, and pens for your participants to go through the exercise of sketching a site-map of their own. They can use the post-its to shuffle around prospective pages and then write down their proposed site map on a sheet of paper to take with them. *By the end of the workshop the participants should be well on their way to planning out their sites. Before taking the Website Design course, they should have notes on what they like and don’t like from competitors sites. They should also have a finalized site map.