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Website Design
In the early days of the Internet, all Web sites generally looked the same and served similar functions. Back then, an average Web site could be described as a big online book with linked pages. In short, in its infancy, the Internet was not all that interesting graphically and was severely lacking in interactive sophistication.
All that has changed. Today’s Internet
is a dynamic amalgam of text, graphics, interactive tools, commerce, and
communication. If you are part of a business, an association, the government,
or an academic institution, chances are a Web site supports some or all
of the mission of the group. But not every venture requires a Web site,
which naturally leads to the question, “Why build a Web site?”
Most organizations and individuals establish a presence
on the Internet for one or more of the following reasons:
a) To sell a product or service directly online
b) To provide information or tools
c) To provide an extension of or support for products and services
d) To find other organizations or people to work in a particular area of
interest
e) To introduce and promote an organization and its mission
f) To remain competitive with other organizations that are already on the
Internet
g) To promote community development by bringing groups of people together
around ideas, people, or causes, either online or in person
h) To share artwork, writing, or photographs
Before you begin to think about the kind of site you’re going to build (either for yourself or for your organization), you should consider each of the following questions carefully. Doing so can help you target your site to an appropriate audience and prepare yourself for the work ahead.
Consider your content:
Consider the early explosion of sites during the dot-com boom. At one point, more than five pet sites were all trying to hawk their wares to users. Only one survived, and that was because it was a traditional retailer first. Market saturation is a sure way to spell doom for your venture, so be sure to check out the competition first!
Select a format and interface:
Know your audience:
Manage your workload:
These questions have no right or wrong answers. Instead, they’re designed to help you formulate an idea of where you’re going when you’re building a site. Frankly, if you’re building a personal site, then these questions are moot to some degree because you can build whatever you want and it may not matter whether someone else can read it or see it. Of course, if you’re thinking about selling your new products on the Web, then these questions can be critical to your overall business success, not just your Web site’s success. For example, if you find that a number of other sites have similar products or a similar focus to what you had in mind for your site, you may consider not building a site at all or changing the focus of the products you are selling.
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What kinds of services, you may be wondering, are people looking for on the Internet? Six years ago, the Internet was largely a research medium, meaningthat people would hit the Internet to try to find information about something fairly academic or obscure. This is not surprising, given that universities were the first groups to start putting their content online.
Today, the number of reasons people head to the Internet has grown dramatically, and includes the following:
These items run the gamut of professional and personal, and they cross demographic lines. What is common among most online users, though, is that they begin their online usage with a focused purpose, and that focus then bleeds over into surfing for things that interest them throughout the Web.
For all its diversity in content, the Internet really doesn’t have that many different types of Web sites. Why do so many Web sites look alike? The main reason is that people want their sites to be easy to use, free (or close to it), and similar to other sites they’ve seen or experienced. This has resulted in the emergence of some standard types of Web sites. A number of components for these sites can be found in ColdFusion. Where applicable, we’ve noted it in the following list. The most common types of sites include:
The Product Site: The most common type of site. Generally, the site offers some basic information about a company, its products, staff members, perhaps a product demo, and a way to contact the organization to get more information. Examples of this kind of site would be www.symantec.com, www.amf.com, and www.nadelectronics.com.
The Commerce Site: A storefront on the Internet. Whether it’s a single company that carries just their own specialized products or a retailer that sells a wide array of products, these sites are geared towards purchasing products and offering accessories to complement those products. An example of this kind of site would be www.macys.com. ColdFusion offers tools that can help you to add a shopping cart, a search function, and more to your site easily.
The Portal Site:
A site that aggregates content from a wide variety of sources. Portal sites
tend to be rich in content and links but short on graphics. The idea is to
provide users with a launching pad to other destinations on the Internet,
though in recent years, many of these
portals are adding features to try to keep their users on their own site.
An example of this kind of site is www.yahoo.com. ColdFusion includes robust
search capabilities that enable you to have more content-rich sites that are
easily indexed and searched.
The News Site: A site that, in general, mirrors an offline counterpart, such as ABC News. These sites provide a lot of the same information as their offline counterparts through the use of text, video, audio, and graphics, and also provide services geared towards the online audience, such as chat sessions, newsletters, and personalized content. An example of this kind of site would be www.cnn.com. ColdFusion includes tools for adding chat to your site as well.
The Application Site:
A type of site that offers perhaps the greatest diversity of all the sites.
Application sites are geared towards a specific purpose, such as banking,
investing, automobile purchasing, travel planning, photo galleries, event
planning, or online greetings. Some of the commonalities among these sites
include user accounts, password protection,
and the widespread use of e-mail campaigns to try to keep users coming back.
Examples of this kind of site include www.egreetings.com, www.imotors.com,
and www.bankofamerica.com.
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