Site Layout & Usability
Article II of V
Topic Areas and Content
Having gone through the planning phases as outlined in the article Planning Your
Web Site, you have identified your major demographic groups already. Using these groups as
a starting point, it is time to begin mapping your site.
In addition to the demographic groups that you identified in the earlier phases
of planning your Parish Web site, consider some of the following:
- Families
- Singles
- Young Adults/College
- Teens
- Children
- Volunteers
- Non-Christians
By grouping relevant information and resources along demographic lines, your
Parish Web site will be much more user friendly. Visitors will be able to easily find
information that is relevant to them, because your Parish Web site has done the work for
them by serving up a cross-section of the functional areas.
Dealing With Functional Area Advocates
Regardless of how well you explain the advantages of organizing your site around
demographic groups, there is a good chance that there will still be people who will
advocate the use of functional areas. Fear not, for there is an easy way to address their
concerns.
The Web is a very dynamic, non-linear medium, but many novice Webmasters forget
that fact. For initial planning purposes, it may be useful to view your Parish Web site as
an outline - topics, sub-topics, sub-sub-topics, ad nauseum - but do not restrict your
layout because of that paradigm. Keep your thinking much more flexible and fluid than
that.
In order to appease the 'functional area advocates', set up link pages for each
of the functional areas within your Parish. The idea is to allow visitors to go to a Music
Ministry page, if they so choose. On that page they will find a synopsis and link to each
of the relevant content pages. The content pages themselves will still reside within the
applicable demographic area, but by setting up a links page for each of the functional
areas, you create yet another way for visitors to find that which is relevant to them.
Gather Existing Content & Formulate a Plan to Create the Rest
Experts have stated that the three keys to creating popular Web sites are
Content, Content and Content. Obviously, the greatest content in the world does you little
good if your visitors are unable to browse your site easily and cannot locate the
information for which they are looking. Likewise, giving your visitors a perfect interface
and top notch navigational tools which they then use to access poor content does not a
popular site make.
Once you have laid out the goals for your Parish Web site and decided on the
demographic groupings (or functional groupings, if you chose that route), you must come up
with enough content to make each area worth visiting.
Step #1: Gather Existing Content
Chances are good that your Parish has been doing at least basic word processing
on computers for quite some time. If this is the case, then you should have a great deal
of content for your Parish Web site already in electronic format. The layout of these
preexisting documents may need to be modified, but this is minor when compared to creating
content from scratch.
You will also, of course, find a great deal of information that has never been
put into electronic format. In these situations, once you have converted the hard copy
information, do not neglect to give a copy of the electronic documents back to the content
owner.
This information-gathering phase is best performed by the Parish staff members.
It is the job of the Parish Webmaster to take the information from the various functional
areas and organize it along demographic (topical) lines. Once this has been accomplished,
it will be very easy to see where you need to develop new content.
Step #2: Identify & Create Any Other Necessary Content
Having identified the available content and organized it according to the topic
areas planned for your Parish Web site, it is again time to look at the goals which you
have set. Does the content available provide what your site needs to achieve these goals?
Is the amount of content adequate to give your first visitors a reason to return? What
else should you share with your visitors in order to meet the goals of your site? If there
is some specific content you still need, is there a way to edit existing documents or must
you create from scratch? If you must create from scratch, who will be responsible for such
creation. In most instances, the content owner (staff member) for the applicable
functional area is the proper person to create the new content. The Parish Webmaster will
have plenty to do without being required to create specialized new content for the site.
It is very important to have the majority of your content compiled/created and
organized during the Site Layout phase of your project. By having the majority of your
site's content created before you begin designing and creating your actual web pages, you
will save yourself many headaches. Having mature content will limit (i) the amount of
content churning, (ii) the number of design changes due to the format of the final copy,
and (iii) the amount of energy wasted on unnecessary page creation.
Web Site Layout, continued...
In the remaining articles of this series, we will discuss in greater detail the
need to include links not only in Nav Bars, but also at the end of content pieces as well
as sprinkled liberally throughout the text of your content. Second, we will spend some
time discussing Cascading Style Sheets, which will allow you to make universal changes to
styles and formatting through the editing of a single file. And finally, we will examine
the importance of good directory structure, including file naming conventions and the
necessity to maintain the URLs of individual pages, even after the main link from within
the site has been relegated to an Archive page.
The interconnectedness created by effective linking, the professionalism
depicted by consistency of style, and the stability manifested through maintaining
relatively static URLs for individual pages are three of the factors which differentiate a
good Parish Web site from a great one! |
