How to Make a website

It seems today that everything is being put on the web. Making a website is so easy that almost anybody can do it, it does not require you to be a great programmer or anything. It just requires you to have a bit of interest in computers and some designing ability. But what should be kept in mind, while you are off designing your own cool new shiny website....

Planning

The planning of the website needs to answer the following questions:
a) What is the goal or objective of the website. Is the website being made to sell a product, project a company, talk about oneself, provide information services or to share and collaborate between a peer group.

b) What are the target audience of the website. Every human being is different, if the target audience are teenagers and young people then aesthetics will be different than if the website is being designed for older people. A website for programmers will be totally different from a website for lawyers.

Design

There are many aspects to a good design. Some of which are:

a) User Friendliness: A website should be as user friendly as possible. A user should be able to access any information or do any transaction with the website with a minimum number of clicks. Now-a-days the number of clicks required to do an operation is a critical part of user study analysis. Minimizing the complexity of design and having the user to make less choices while still making him feel in control is the key to a more user friendly website.

b) User Myopia: Users tend to be myopic. They do not go through all the information written on a webpage, their field of vision is very limited. This is because through the internet, you are exposed to a large amount of content through the internet, and usually you are there on a website for a very specific purpose. Thus, a design should take this into account.

c) Information organization: The information should be organized in such a way that it satisfies the 80-20 rule. About only 20% of the website content will be seen by the 80% of the users. You need to optmize and find that 20% content to make the users happy. This will lead to good organization and better access for the user. The general rule of thumb for a good website is, that you want your website to serve highly relevant content and the user should be able to move on from the website as soon as he is done.

d) Less text and more graphics: It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Although this may not be applicable to all the pages, but a website designer should understand that a website is not a novel. A website is made on multimedia medium and should make full use of it. So, it should contain a healthy amount of information being given using hyperlinks, images and videos.

Implementation

There are really very few rules here since the amount of technologies available to do the same stuff is increasing exponentially. But the general rules are:

a) Keep the page load times minimal: You do not want to bloat the website. A good website should be using features like appcache and should have less content on their home pages so as to load faster.

b) Know the traffic on your website and plan accordingly: The worst thing you can have is have Google index your website and direct so much traffic to your homepage that it crashes. Plan the servers and the backends accordingly to handle all the anticipated and unanticipated load. You don't really want to be featured on a TechCrunch news article and be down on the same day. But with that said, we have seen outages even from experienced companies like Google and Microsoft in recent times.


Thats all you need... off you go to make your own new shiny website.