Website and Graphic Design
Website and Graphic Design
This article was first published on July 13, 1998.
The information you want to present on your site.
Commercial Web Sites
Web sites that promote a product or service should to offer more than existing promotional literature and advertising campaigns. A person will need a reason to visit this type of site after seeing its address, in an advert for example. People would not like to read the same text and see the same photographs as they have just seen in the brochure or advertisement.
You need to decide what information you want to publish and which services or products you want to promote via your Web Site. You may want to get feedback from the visitors by using online forms, if so you will need to know what questions you need to ask, and how you will use this information.
Personal Web Sites
If you are publishing your portfolio or resume it is relatively easy to write your content, after all you know your qualifications, experience and abilities.
Sites that want to express thoughts and share interests and knowledge of a particular subject will need a little more planning. You have to think about who will visit your Site and whether they have other sites that cover the same topics that yours does. If this is the case then you will need to provide something new and original, something that makes your Web site different from all the others.
General
If you intend to update your Web site on a regular basis, then you need to decide how often and what parts of the site will need updating. Updating content on a regular basis can take up a lot of time, especially if you are the only writer of content, so it might be wise to publish one section that requires frequent updates and see how much effort it takes to keep it up-to-date, if you are content (no pun intended) with updating just one section then you can expand your Web site. If there are portions of a Web site that visitors expect to be updated and they find that they have not then you will lose popularity (not good if you run a commercial Web site).
Content needs to be original and interesting, easily understood and should always leave the viewer feeling that they have had a benefited from the time spent looking at your Web site.
Before planning and writing the content for either type of Web site you will need to know;
September 7, 2010
