Planning to Build A Website
By Vaishali Singh
Posted Friday, October 1, 2004
Zen and the art of spinning the web centres around helping you conceive, plan, create and design your website.
We all want to build websites that win, websites that are appreciated by all and visited by lots. And to do that, they have to provide an enriching experience to our visitors, not neglecting download time, browser compatibility and so on and so forth. Anything that starts well ends well. I am sure that you are all aware of the phrase. True indeed!
For any project to be successful, a good plan is essential. So, what's the plan? Whether you are designing for yourself, your company's in-house project, or a client, your project specifications would see to it that you make everyone happy, including yourself. Delivering on deadlines becomes far much easier with a well laid out plan.
A Creative Brief for your Creativity...
If you are designing for a client, you must insist on a complete comprehensive brief before you start off with the project. Clients have a tendency to make last moment changes and tweaking which you could never get rid of no matter how hard you try. What a nightmare! But a water tight brief goes a long way to help you charge the client extra money for the changes that come at the last moment.
Even if you are working for an in house project, you are in for heartburn… not always though. Meeting get postponed, specifications change and since you are a part of the company, you and your time are taken for granted. But here again always insist on a comprehensive specification and plan for the project before your go headlong with your project.
Make sure, someone is assigned "Ownership" of the project, so that there is a person who is officially in charge is available to sign off the finished product. This person should be able to take overall responsibility of the project, give specification, clarification and a clear feedback. Otherwise, each would go their own way, implementing their own ideas and you would be listening to all, pleasing some, and ending up with an unsatisfactory product.
Allot enough time for yourself and your team to complete the job. Slip in extra week or two as buffer time to test, evaluate and to do last minute touch ups and polishing. If possible, get the client / in-house project leader to sign-off the specification, to avoid confusion later.
Well if you were designing for yourself, you are the boss and you know the best…but here again, you must plan out your action to create a website that would make you proud.
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