Site Maps

This is the understanding of what the website is going to be used for, who will use the website, and what people are going to do with your website once they arrive to the page. The first major point of site maps is how your information achitechture will work throughout your website. Even with major websites, many skip these site maps and think complex sites are too difficult to represent in this matter. If you take time on this simple set in the begining, then it avoids many problems and the biggest problem that arises, bad navagation structures. If you do the planning early, you will avoid all the hardships and avoid having a complecated website that nobody understands.

Planning Checklist

The most important thing in the planning checklist is the client. You want to talk with the client and plan the site along with them. Uderstanding things that they want to comunicate and to give them your insight and knowledge on their questions and planning. Secondly is the users that you need to design for and uderstadning their behavior is one of the most important thing of planning. If you dont know your users for who you are designing for, then get them directly involved with the usase and development. Third is the budget that the client is working with and is very important. Many designers dont plan because they havent been quoted it. When you get the clients butget, you can plan out what you can create for what their budget is.

Joy of Tech

The more and more technology get advanced and go further beyond just text and images, you have to take into account different media compinents like video animations, image galleries, and downloadable files. These all affect bandwith costs for your website and also require specific hosting for certain websites. Also how data is managed changes the way a site has to be built and has to be decided prior to touching a line of code to minimize costs. This is because you can decide if you use data in your own database or or other places it has to grab data from. These differences determine the way things are integrated into the site though code and visually.