Chapter 3 - Pulling Together the Content

1. Discovering Content Needs
   1. Responsibility--Web designer or client?
   2. Questions to ask client:
      1. What pages other than home?
      2. About us page?
      3. Products page?
      4. Services page?
      5. Contact page?
      6. Work/portfolio page?
      7. News/Press Releases?
      8. Events?
      9. Other pages?
      10. What elements should appear on every page?
      11. E-commerce/Shopping cart?
      12. Multi-language?
      13. Who will provide graphics, photos, etc.?
      14. What else? Photo gallery, blog, password protected areas, administrative backend, calculators, etc?
   3. Wireframes (or bubbles, or the back of a napkin)
      1. Determine areas of pages and the type of content that will go into each area
      2. Responsibility--Web designer or client?
      3. Site navigation
      4. Template items (items that will appear on each page)
      5. Interactive components
      6. Dynamic functionality
      7. Dummy text
   4. Sources of Content
      1. Brochures
      2. Business Cards
      3. Newsletters
      4. Writing content. Responsibility --Web designer or client?
   5. Hiring Illustrators and Photographers
      1. Why should a web designer hire a photographer if he/she has a digital camera and can shoot snapshots for free?
      2. What about if the client has digital photos? Should you use those instead of hiring a photographer?
   6. Stock Images
      1. Web sites: Corbis, Big Stock Photo, Shutterstock (Subscription), Getty Images, Fotosearch, and much more
      2. "Royalty Free"
      3. Copyright
   7. Page Titles
   8. Meta Tags (Description, Keywords)
2. Organizing Site Content
   1. Ideally, everything in the site should be within 3-4
3. Site Map
   1. Show all pages and how they relate to each other

Assignment for Chapters 1-3:

1. Decide on a web site that you would like to create or modify. It could be associated with your work or a personal web site. If you do not have a "real" project in mind, you can create web site for a hypothetical organization.
2. Create a purpose statement for your planned site.
3. Describe the proposed site's image. Remember, at this point you are in the planning stages of the site, so the site does not yet exist.
4. Find two similar sites. They could be sites of competitors or other organizations that have goals similar to yours.
   1. Write down URLs of the two home pages.
   2. Briefly describe the content of each of the sites. What is similar between the two sites? What is unique to each site?
5. List pages that you plan to include on your site.
6. Will there be any dynamically created elements? If so, what?
7. Describe two techniques you plan to implement to drive traffic to your site.
8. Create a description of your ideal site visitor, similar to examples found on page 45.
9. Draw a wireframe for your home page and two other pages in your planned site.
10. Describe where the content for the site will come from.
11. Create a site map.