Web site design and production.
Step one: site flow.
There are several steps involved in designing and producing a Web site. The first step is to develop the flow of your site. Ask yourself these key questions: What will be on my home page? Where can visitors to my site go from there? If you think of your site like a family tree, it may be easier to imagine how you want your visitors to be able to navigate through your site.
Your home page would be the trunk, or foundation, of your tree. Branching off from it are your sub-pages - pages that tell your visitors about the unique aspects of your business, who you are and how to reach you. Each of your sub-pages may have links from them going to yet another level of pages, offering more details, choices or options to the visitor. Just like a tree with large branches that divide into many smaller branches, your site can have as many levels as you need to tell your story.
The key to setting up the flow of your site is to make navigation through the pages sensible and simple. If you give someone too many choices on any one page, they may get frustrated and leave your site.
Step two: designing your site.
Next you will need to design your site. Begin by gathering your images, text, video, animations, sound files, etc. - all of the elements that you will need to construct your site. Make a list of the things that have not been created yet.
As your designer, I will be able to do rough sketches with placeholder boxes indicating where your elements will go on each of your main pages. The illustrations at left show two possible ways of sketching out the same page - one a little more precisely rendered than the other.
These page designs will be the beginning of your site's templates. Web pages are based on templates - some parts of your pages will be identical, while other parts will be unique to each individual page. This gives you a continuity to your site, while still giving you the flexibility to populate each page with pertinent information.
Step 3: layouts.
Doing a layout is an important part of Web design. A layout is a more detailed rendering of the important pages of your site. Typically, one page for each template is rendered for your approval.
You will see buttons, menus, logos, photos, banners, navbars, etc. - whatever elements are necessary to give you a good idea of what the final look of your pages will be. Some layouts need to be very detailed, while others can be more simplified. The layout is your first real look at how the pages of your site will actually appear to your viewer. The buttons, menus and such won't work yet, but you will see how great they look in your layout stage!
Step 4: creating or editing your page elements.
This is where I take all of your page elements - photos, logos, animations, sound files, etc. - and prepare them for use on your web site. They may need resized, cleaned up, reformatted or completely redone. Some may not exist yet, and will need to be created from scratch.
For example, you can see that the original images shown at left needed work before they could be used for the Philly Arts Film Fest Web site (see photo in Step 3).
If you haven't finished writing your text yet, you will do that now. Banners may need to be assembled, and any background images will need to be created.
Step 5: making your pages.
This is where I construct the actual pages of your site. I build your templates, and then I make all of your pages from them. The pages that I have custom-designed for you will now be built by me, your Web designer. Any complex actions that you may want your site to perform are subcontracted out to a computer programmer at this time. Step six below will tell you more about that.
Step 6: writing scripts.
If you are collecting information from your viewer, analyzing data, populating pages from a database, or require other complex actions from your site - such as in the page in the photo at right - a computer programmer may need to write scripts for you. If you need scripts written, they would be subcontracted out while I am constructing your pages.
Step 7: uploading your Web site.
Before your site is uploaded, it must be tested. Each browser may display your page a little differently. This is to be expected. Not everyone has the same typefaces as you do. Or the same kind of computer. Or the same operating system. And so on. These are all variables that you cannot control, so the goal is to make your pages look good no matter what the variables.
Your site will need to be viewed in many ways, and any oddities that appear will need to be corrected or "debugged." Once that is done, I can upload the site to your server and you are live on the Internet!
Hitek Graphics sample sites.
The site you are viewing right now, Hitek Graphics, is one of my Web sites. I have done all of the steps mentioned above by myself. There are no outside scripts written by programmers. This is my site - start to finish.
Another site that I have done completely on my own is: www.hitektraining.com
The examples that I have used on this page are fictitious - developed only to illustrate the different steps involved in developing your Web site.
I am currently working on several more sites from start to finish, and will post the URLs as soon as I have uploaded them.
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