Objectives and functionality check list
Site objectives
Clearly a web site is designed to communicate, but with whom and to what end?
- Let people know of your existence
- Publish details about where to find you
- Tell people about your organisation and its activities
- Give people the opportunity to join or support your organisation
- Post information you would like people to have, e.g. from research or observation
- Make electronic publications available to public
- Persuade people to do something (or not do something)
- Run an answer service - help desk or FAQ's
- Let people know about what you have to offer - for free or for sale
- Persuade and enable people to place orders
- Enable people to buy on line
- Gather information from people, say for research purposes
- Gather and report people's views
- Provide an online forum or chat room for exchange of information and ideas
- Give people access to a database of information
In all these cases the people, the target audiences should be identified - the public, professionals, the young, etc. if the presentation is to be appropriate
Site functionality
It is important to identify the functionality required to meet the chosen objectives before selecting your web hoster as not all Internet service providers provide the same facilities. The following require special facilities:
- Electronic forms The means of transferring a visitor's data (entered into forms) from their computer to an e-mail address in your organisation(in the form of data field names and data entries listed in pairs) requires some form of scripting to be run on an appropriate server. Level 4 browsers and later can usually do this without a script but in a primitive manner, however.
- Catalogues and order forms depending on complexity this may or may not be possible using standard facilities.
- Electronic transfer of funds such as for purchase requires secure server, accreditation and so on. Alternatively you may be able to get an electronic shopping mall to sell things for you.
- Forums and guest books involve allowing visitors to post information on the web site for recall by other visitors. This involves the use of CGI scripting or ASP pages.
- Live databases on your web site which automatically update when visitors enter data, or where large amounts of data have to be handled and assembled 'on the fly' then the server must be able to run the necessary software which will probably involve database/SQL software running on the server.
- Chat rooms are rather like real time message boards. Some third party organisations offer hosting of chat rooms but in-house chat rooms require significant design and implementation effort and an appropriate server.
There are many different technologies available. CGI/PERL, active server pages (ASP) and PHP/MySQL are examples; talk to your designer.
Site presentation
Presentation is extremely important as visitors to your site are always in a hurry and can always move on to another if they get frustrated. Your site needs to carefully organised so people can find their way around it. The colours, images and multimedia effects you use all contribute to the image given of your organisation and its acceptability to visitors. Whereas some advertising sites may need to use 'flash' animation and sound to keep young members of the public interested in your site, this might have the opposite effect when catering for professionals or regular users.
Differences from print
It is worth noting that web pages differ from the printed word in several ways:
- The visitor's browser type, window size and shape are not within your control. Nor do you have total control of the layout, although there are techniques to get round this. If layout is critical, PDF format can be used, but this increases the file sizes and download times significantly.
- Not all the page will be visible and you rely on scroll bars and live links to get around a page of any size. It is easy to get lost
- Pages must download quickly and be easily found and assimilated or your visitors will move on somewhere else. So presentation is important and file sizes should be kept small by stripping out unnecessary code and carefully preparing images.
- A web page is often not a single file but is put together on the fly from a number of files by the browser as they load.
- Except as images you are restricted to the few fonts your visitors are bound to have on their computer, on the other hand you can be liberal with colour as this costs nothing.
Note that not all browsers can do fancy things or even interpret the files in the same way and this may affect what you attempt to do. There is a trade-off between compatibility and functionality and browser types and levels need to be identified.
