Module 1 – Preparation is everything
If someone was building a house, you would think they were crazy to start with the roof? But this is exactly what some people do when they design a website! They find a website designer and start planning what kind of ‘blue’ or font to use and, before they know it, they have spent £5,000 and have a very flashy website which looks just like Peter Gabriel’s; but with nothing much really to say, or to share, or to give to visitors so they keep returning.
The house building metaphor is a good one because, like any house building project, there is a lot of preparation and groundwork to do, before even a single house brick can be laid.
So, why do people jump straight into the design of a website and try to build the roof first?
Perhaps it is mainly because we are a very visually orientated society. We often judge things by how they look. So how a site looks is seen as more important than what the site says? Of course, how a site looks IS important, but nowhere near as important as having something really worthwhile to say, and saying it really well.
Before you can start your website, you will need to ask some important questions about what you want to say in your site and we will be looking at some of these questions in this module.
The Web Snip Principle
Building a website IS, quite literally, like building a spiders web. This is probably why the World Wide Web it named after a Web? A spider’s web is a very beautiful looking construction of interelated strands, all relying upon eachother to maintain tension and hold the whole form together. This is exactly how a website is constructed.
So, if you snip even one strand of a spider’s web, the whole thing shakes and shivers, and some parts of the web may even collapse, causing other parts to shake and shiver and potentially collapse. This is what happens when you don’t prepare your website very well. You go 3 months down the road and then realise some of the decisions made 3 months earlier no longer work, or have implications you had not thought about.
Preparation is everything when you build a website, just like building a house. If you watch a spider building a spider’s web, there is an awful lot of preparation and a great deal of patient planning.
The rest of this first component is about the 3 most important questions you should ask before progressing with any website design; how to do your website Research and Auditing; and how to put together an effective Website Development Team. ...
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