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Design: Planning Your Site
Steps in designing a website
The following steps show the approximate percentage
of time each one takes:
1. Planning the purpose the purpose and content
(15%).
2. Storyboarding (outlining the flow of the site) (25%).
3. Creating the site in an HTML editor (such as Dreamweaver) (55%).
4. Testing the site and registering it with search engines. (5%).
Planning the purpose and content
The first step to creating a website is to plan
what you want to have in it. Do some brainstorming. What is the
theme of your website? If you can’t think of a topic, make
it about you.
Take some time now to make a list of things you
can include in your website. Things you might want to include:
- An introduction about yourself, your background
and hobbies.
- Any pictures you have about yourself, friends,
pets or family.
- Information and pictures about your hometown
or the city you are in now.
- Pictures or animations you have seen on the
Internet, such as animals, cartoons, nature, or cities.
- Your email address, so people can contact
you.
- Links to websites you like.
- Links to your friends' websites.
- Links to your school website.
- Stories, essays, or poems you have written.
- Anything else you want!
Storyboarding your site
Now that you have an idea of the purpose of your
website and what a good website looks like, the next step is to
plan how the pages will look and how they will connect to each other.
This is called Storyboarding. This step is very important, as it
could save you much time and trouble later if you do it properly.
Using a separate page of blank paper for each page of your website,
plan out what you want to have on each page. For your first website,
it is best to keep it limited to three to five pages.
Proper planning at the storyboarding stage will
prevent hours of extra work later on. However, storyboarding is
a skill that is learned, and as you practice making websites you
will get better at this. In fact, if this is your first website,
be prepared to make many mistakes and even to have to redo your
website again to get it just the way you want. This is quite common.
Think of this first time as a learning experience and a chance to
experiment. Don’t worry about mistakes so that you can have
more fun at this learning stage.
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