Website Design

Content, content, content!

Content should be the first thing you think about when building your site. Whether you are building a site for use just by your family and friends, or you expect thousands of visitors every day, they will all expect content.

Content can be entertainment, information or a mixture of the two. The first thing you need to ask yourself is, "What is my site about? Do I intend to educate, inform, or entertain?"

Let's imagine you want to build a website about your trip down the Amazon river. The primary purpose of your content will be entertainment, but you can also make the site informational and educational as well. You will be able to include lots of information about the geography, flora and fauna, inhabitants, dangers, etc of the region on your site.

Structure

Now lets think about how you want to structure the content. Nothing is worse than a site with the content all parcelled out in tiny pieces across the site. Think about how you want to present your information. You might decide to create a "virtual tour" with photographs and text detailing your journey. Maybe you want to present the information in one place and the photographs in another. Perhaps you kept a diary of your trip and you want to give the information in date order. Whichever you want to do, the structure of the site should give your visitors the information and entertainment they want in the most logical way.

Let's say we're going to create a virtual tour. So we lay out the website rather like this:

• Homepage
• My trip - page 1 - before setting off - with photos of us all packed and ready, commentary on why we decided to go, and information about how we prepared for the trip
• My trip - page 2 - the first leg - photos of our arrival in our first location, commentary about what we saw, did and felt, and information about the area
• My trip - page 3 - the second leg - more photos, commentary, and information

You get the idea. What we don't want is this:

• Homepage
• My trip, from beginning to end in photos
• Information about the area
• Commentary on our journey

The above method might be right for a more factual approach to the subject, but useless for a virtual tour.

Pick the right method for the approach you want.

Information

Your website should ideally provide new information, or information that is presented in a creative or original way. There is an old writer's adage, "Write what you know", and it applies equally well to websites as it does to fiction. However, it's best to also do some research to make sure the information you're presenting is accurate and reliable. We've already described some of the information you might present on your Amazon Journey website.

Even if you're making a site to showcase your artistic and/or graphical talents, there's nothing like information to back that up. If you're into digital art, how did you produce those effects? What programs did you use? Where did your inspiration come from?

A genealogical site? Fine! How about some information on how you got started researching the family tree, to help other people who may share this interest?

Interest

A site that appeals to many people can sometimes be a difficult thing to achieve whilst still keeping the central theme of the site together. However, by adding entertainment or information value, your site will appeal to more people.

Let's think about our Amazon Journey site. How many people would come and visit if the site was just composed of your photographs? Not many, probably just your family and friends. Add in your educational and informational value though, by way of including all the relevant topics we talked about before, and you're on your way to a site that people will enjoy surfing. Put some entertainment value with that, as in creating a virtual tour, and you've got a site that people will come back to, and refer to their friends, even if they had no interest in the subject beforehand.

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Links

Picking sites you want to link to is a delicate subject. It can be tempting to just pick a bundle of links; stick "Amazon River" into a search engine and you'll be inundated with sites, any or all of which you can link to.

Make sure that any sites you link to are appropriate for the topic. Your site on the Amazon isn't going to come across very well if you're linking to your best friend's site about cheese. Or your mum's site about her collection of china cows. There is a place for these links, and that's in your favourites folder.

There are two methods of presenting links. Firstly, you can have the links spread across the site, on pages that are particularly relevant to them. Or, you can collect all your links on one page. You could, of course, always use both of these methods.

Let's think about our virtual tour site, and what links might be appropriate to it. In section one, which is about our preparation for the journey, we might want some links to sites giving general advice to travellers, sites giving general information on the region, and maybe sites detailing what health precautions, e.g. vaccinations, might be required. We can present these links at the foot of the page, or mixed in with the text.

We can also then have a separate page of links on the site as well, split into sections such as "Before you travel", "Information on the Amazonian region", "Flora of the Amazon", "Other virtual tours on the net", etc.

Make sure you check out sites before linking. If you link to sites of poor quality, it will also leave a bad impression of your site. If the sites are non-commercial, you could also ask the webmaster for a reciprocal link.

Spelling and Grammar

You might think spelling and grammar is nit-picking, boring or irrelevant, but it can be one of the most important factors on your site. If you haven't bothered to correct your spellings, how can I be sure that you have bothered to check any of the information on your site? Checking your spelling and grammar is an indication that you have taken time and care over your site.

The best and quickest method I have found is to copy your text into your word-processing program and just run the on-board spell-checker. Okay, it will throw up names of people and places as errors, but it will also pick up the typos and spelling errors that we all make from time to time.

An excellent resource for improving your writing skills is WebGrammar.com. They offer a good primer of basic grammar skills as well as comprehensive links to many other on-line resources. They also offer general webmaster links, too.

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