When people talk about designing web sites, they often make general statements about the best way to design any web site. What they often fail to consider is that there are many different kinds of sites, and what works in one instance, might not be the best solution in another.

Usability experts, like Jakob Nielsen, tend to focus on corporate clients and the efficiency of a web site to decide whether or not it is a success. Indeed, usability is important if you need to ensure that your users can quickly navigate through your site and commit to an online purchase before they change their minds. However, this is not the focus of every web site.

People who work on sites with large amounts of text often feel every site would serve its audience better by having a complete separation of style from content. This is important if you would like to make text-based content available to as wide an audience as possible. The content of these sites can then be displayed in whatever manner the end user desires, using whatever type of web device they like.

Not all sites have the same goals. The experience of exploring a new and creative user interface is the reason that web sites like MONO*CRAFTS have become popular in the first place. In the absence of the creative navigation scheme, the site would have a much smaller audience. Being more usable and attempting to separate style from content would actually make the site less effective.

A successful web site shouldn’t begin with graphics and code, but with a little planning. This first and most important of steps is often overlooked. Understanding what will work best for your site is something you should spend some time thinking about early in the design process. Every web site should begin with a little thought by the designer as to what they are trying to accomplish by building it in the first place. Planning doesn’t need to be a long, complicated process, and it will pay off in the long run.

Goal

What are you hoping to achieve by posting your web site? Some of the more common reasons people create web sites includes:

• Attracting regular viewers and profiting from advertising
• Creating something to help people
• Impressing people in some way
• Influencing people to take a course of action
• Meeting other people with similar interests
• Making it easy for people to purchase something from you

Sometimes people have multiple reasons for creating a web site, but there is usually a single most important reason. Everything you do when creating a web site should help you reach this goal. Knowing what you are trying to accomplish with your site will help you choose the best approach to take. Whether you focus on usability, accessibility, or cutting edge design will depend largely on what you’ve set as your goal.

Audience

No single web site can be all things to all people. You can’t expect to have an audience of “everyone” and communicate with them in “every way.” While this seems like a nice idea in theory, it simply isn’t practical. Can you really expect to make a web site that will meet the needs of everyone in the world, regardless of the browser they are using, the language they speak, or whether they are even able to read?

Your audience might be as small a group as a few of your close friends, or as large as several million people. They should be the group of people best able to help you meet your goal by accessing your web site. The audience you choose should be interested in the content you have to offer, and you should present it to them in the most appropriate format for them. By recognizing that you aren’t actively trying to reach everyone at once, you are better able to make decisions about things that might help or hinder the success of your site.

Content

Your content is what people come to your site for, and what they will possibly return for as well. Many people think it is limited to a site’s text, photos, or files available for download, but there are several more types of content. A product that can be purchased at an e-commerce site is content. A particularly compelling user experience can also be a form of content. Impressive graphics, innovative layout, and cutting edge design represent the content on a large number of web design resource sites. Ask yourself “what am I putting online?” That’s your content.

Consider how often you will need to update your site. If you will need to make changes frequently, consider developing your site in a way that allows you to perform this task with greater ease. If you are working with a large amount of text, you might benefit from the separation of style from content. An easy way to continually update your content without altering the visual presentation is to keep your code basic and apply formatting with headers, footers and cascading style sheets.

However, the content on some sites can’t be separated from the style quite as easily. A web site promoting a new movie or video game is a good example. The presentation of the information to the audience is as much the “content” as what is actually being said. In this case, attempting to separate style and content doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t advance the sites goals very much either.

Format

Your goals, audience and content will all influence the format you choose when posting your content online. In addition to HTML, you might use audio, video, pdf documents, Flash animation, WAP, or something more specialized like 3D.

If you choose to use HTML, you still need to decide how accessible to make your documents. Will you create a site that looks better in a particular browser, or on a particular size of monitor, or will you try to make your content available to as many people as possible?

If your goal is to share something you’ve written with a wide audience, you should choose a highly accessible format such as standard HTML pages that work in as many browsers as possible. However, keep in mind that maximum accessibility won’t advance the goals of every kind of web site. There wouldn’t be any point to making a site like Praystation, which shows examples of new Flash techniques, without actually using Flash techniques.

Conclusion

Planning your site goes far beyond navigation, interface and structure. Understanding your audience, your purpose, your goals and your methodology to get there will help you make the right decisions when developing your web site.

Checklist

• Understand the primary goal of your web site.
• Your audience is the group of people best able to help you meet your goal.
• Content is what attracts people to your web site.
• Plan for updates. Make this process as simple as possible.
• Choose a format that enhances your message while being accessible to your audience.