Starting with a clear understanding of your goals assures that everyone involved is working toward a common purpose, prevents false starts, and saves time and money. Web sites can be for commerce, entertainment, marketing, information, education, communication, etc. Spending time getting agreement on the purposes of the web site saves much trial and error later. Understanding your intended audience will determine what knowledge they will bring to your site, as well as their technical abilities to use advanced multimedia functions.
The scope of the information to be placed on a site needs to be determined. Unless the purpose of the site is to provide reference material, more is not necessarily better. Gathering the information to be used often leads to a good feeling on how it should be organized.
This is a process much like advertisers and film makers use. The material should be sketched out for each web page, and a graphic design selected. Although the layout of the various pages will vary, it is important to keep a common theme in the graphic design, so that a user knows that he is still in your web site as he moves from page to page. This can be done by keeping common colors, type faces, and navigational structures, and logos.
An effective navigational structure lets the user know where he is in your site, and what to do to get the information he desires. With the storyboards available, figuring out how to organize them may be fairly straightforward. A tree structure is common, where you start from a common start point, and branch out into various topics, which themselves branch to sub-topics This is often modified, where information on a page in one of the branches provides links to pages in another branch.
It is generally a good idea at this point to implement several of the key pages in the design to see what they look like. Is the graphic design pleasing, is the navigational structure user friendly, are the pages too big or too small? Make changes as necessary.
The web designer generates the HTML for the sites, generates the needed programs and databases to accompany it, and loads it onto a web server.
This phase makes sure that the site's navigational linkages work, that the web pages are displayed as expected with the major browsers, and that any programs that accompany the web site are functional. In major sites, there are human factors testing with representative users to determine usability.
Release the site to the production web server. Encourage compatible sites to provide linkages to your site. Advertise the existence of your web site on your stationary, business cards, and media advertising.
People using the internet expect that the information provided is current. An accounting firm that displays the 1998 tax tables loses credibility fast. Keep the information up to date, respond to trouble reports, provide timely answers to the e-mail that is generated.