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    Web Design For Dummies
    Web Design For Dummies
    Web Design For Dummies
    Ebook606 pages5 hours

    Web Design For Dummies

    By Lisa Lopuck

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    About this ebook

    Get up to speed on the newest technologies, tools, and possibilities in web design

    Have a great idea for a web site but don't know where or how to begin? Web Design For Dummies, 3rd Edition is an ideal starting point! Fully updated to cover the latest and the greatest in the world of web design, this fun-but-straightforward guide gets you caught up with everything you need to know to organize your ideas, create a template, start development, test to make sure everything is working properly, and launch your finished site. Packed with invaluable advice on incorporating social media aspects, linking content with social sites, and designing for mobile devices, this book will have you web designing like a pro in no time.

    • Highlights the many significant changes in the world of web design since the previous edition, including the introduction of HTML5, new technologies for sharing media, mobile web design, and more
    • Zeroes in on effectively using color, text, and navigation
    • Reveals helpful advice for avoiding common pitfalls
    • Details ways to connect with social sites like Twitter and Facebook

    Web Design For Dummies, 3rd Edition goes beyond just making a basic web site and instead encourages you to create a site that is appealing, practical, and useful.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWiley
    Release dateMar 21, 2012
    ISBN9781118235546
    Web Design For Dummies

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    • 5/5
      Very simple, if you need a book to start your website, this is the one.
    • 3/5
      Web Design for Dummies is about as technical as you might expect from any of "For Dummies" books. As usual, these books cover almost every topic of web design. However, don't expect to pick up a "For Dummies" book and expect to be a master craftsman in your field.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    Web Design For Dummies - Lisa Lopuck

    Part I

    The Web Design Kick-Off

    9781118004906-pp0101.eps

    Professional website production involves a lot of complex, interdependent tasks and requires an experienced team of people to get everything done. As you embark on your adventures in web design and/or web management, a good first step is to understand this production process from start to finish — and the people involved — so you have a holistic picture of what to expect and know where you fit in along the way. In fact, even though many design firms tout their mastery of the web-production process as a selling point when they’re trying to win bids, the truth is that most firms follow the same or similar process: Define, Design, Develop, Deploy. The client then gets to handle Phase Five — Maintenance!

    In Chapter 1, I introduce you to the different types of roles and responsibilities associated with the web-production process. In Chapter 2, I take you through the whole production process, showing how design agencies and in-house design teams manage Web projects from start to finish.

    9781118004906-pp0102.tif9781118004906-pp0103.tif9781118004906-pp0104.tif9781118004906-ba01.tif

    1

    So You’re Designing a Website

    9781118004906-co01.tif

    In This Chapter

    arrow Understanding team members’ roles and responsibilities

    arrow Getting started on your web-design career

    The digital industry has been exploding since its inception — from websites to mobile applications and social media, the opportunities are endless. This is great news for you if you’re thinking about becoming a professional web designer. The industry is ever-changing and evolving — and exciting, rapid developments are around every corner.

    Web design is not just about creating a series of pages that looks good. In this book, I show you how to design a cohesive site that links its parts together in a way that delivers on business goals and makes sense to the user. Modern websites can consist of hundreds of pages. As a professional web designer or manager, your job is to know how to integrate design and navigation using a myriad of technologies and techniques to build an effective site.

    While building a professional-grade website may seem like a daunting task, if you understand the process from start to finish and the roles of the people involved, you’ll be on better footing to get started.

    In this chapter, I introduce you to the different players that you’ll surround yourself with on your journey through professional web design.

    The People Involved

    Designing websites is such a huge undertaking that to do it right, you really need a team of people — whether working with an internal team, with vendors, or independent consultants. Here is a sampling of the major players, their roles, and when you need them.

    Business folks and clients

    In the early days, you could get away with sticking a website up on the Internet and expect to get reasonable traffic without much further effort. In the crowded Internet highways of today, however, you really need a business strategy and a marketing plan. The business and marketing folks, whether internal or your client, must be involved with the website from the very beginning. They are in charge of the following responsibilities:

    check.png Setting the goals and requirements for the site. You must always understand the business goals, in order of priority, of the site. For example, the number one goal may be to sell product. The business people not only provide the top three-or-so goals to set the site’s direction but will also need to provide a list of site requirements — essentially a wish list of the site’s capabilities — its ability to do X.

    check.png Identifying the target customer. The marketing team members are the ones that are closest to a business’s end consumer. They should provide a profile picture of the ideal customer that the site must cater to. The information architects (discussed later in this chapter, these are people who design a site’s underlying structure) on the team will use this data to develop a set of personas that will focus the creative team’s efforts throughout the web development process.

    webspeak_4c.eps check.png Reeling in the visitors. The marketing team also needs to figure out how to direct customers to the site. In the Internet business, getting eyeballs (attracting people to your site) is not as easy as it sounds; it involves search engine optimization (SEO), partnering with other companies, and developing an integrated online and offline strategy. For these reasons, the marketing folks need to get started on their plan right away.

    Producers and project managers

    Once clients and companies are committed to a new web project, invariably their eyes tend to get bigger than the budget. Often times, they will ask for the moon because they simply do not understand the complexities that go into web development. Among many other responsibilities, the main job of the producer or project manager is to set and manage client expectations so the project stays on track. (For simplicity’s sake, from here on out, I’ll simply refer to this role as the producer.) Using a variety of tools such as Microsoft Project, shown in Figure 1-1, the producer must keep the project, the team members, the client, and the budget on track from start to finish.

    warning_4c.eps One of the most common problems a producer must address on a project is scope creep. Features and functions that you did not plan for have an uncanny ability to find their way into the design. Often you’ll find that either the project team members are trying to prove themselves by gold-plating (overdoing) their contributions or clients are scrutinizing the site and suggesting way too many changes and enhancements. In either case, such constant noodling can add up to more time and money than you had planned. To limit scope creep, be sure to contingency-plan for a reasonable number of unforeseen changes, and watch for additions that crop up during the course of the project so you can manage or eliminate them.

    Successful project management is keeping the members of the web development team on the same page throughout the project. Balancing the needs of the client, the goals of the site, and the reality of scope and budget are challenging tasks. Establishing clear communication means understanding the needs of the client and individual team members. Following a process and understanding the overall goals and objectives of the site from the onset is also critical to the success of a project. The goal is to maintain clear objectives through each phase of development, to manage scope creep (the tendency of projects to expand in size), and to predict the future.

    Kelly Goto, Company President, www.gotomedia.com

    9781118004906-fg0101.tif

    Figure 1-1: Most web producers use project tracking software like Microsoft Project to manage schedules, resources, and milestones.

    Information architects

    This impressive-sounding title goes to the person whose job it is to sit down and figure out how the whole site fits together and how people will navigate from one page to the next. They also are the ones who develop personas — profiles of the target user — and will be the ones conducting user testing later in the development process.

    webspeak_4c.eps Among the first tasks of an information architect is to design a sitemap diagram (like the one shown in Figure 1-2) that shows all the main sections of the site. The IA, as this person is often referred to, then dives into the page-level detail and creates a series of wireframe diagrams, like the example shown in Figure 1-3, that show the content and navigational elements that go on each major page of the site. The term wireframe, which crops up throughout this book, originates from an established technique in 3D modeling that uses onscreen lines that look like wire mesh to rough out basic shapes before rendering them further. The term was adopted early on by the web-design industry to refer to the diagram-like page sketches that precede the visual design stage. Between the sitemap and the wireframe diagrams drawn for each major page, the information architect, in effect, builds the blueprints for the entire site. This is a critical first step before you can dive into visual design exploration.

    9781118004906-fg0102.tif

    © OHM Cycles. http://ohmcycles.com/

    Figure 1-2: A sitemap is like a bird’s-eye view of your website, showing all its sections.

    9781118004906-fg0103.tif

    Figure 1-3: A wireframe shows the structural layout, interaction design, and content plan for a page.

    Visual designers

    Armed with the sitemap and wireframes that define the underlying site structure, it’s the visual designer’s job to extend a company’s brand image and character into a website look and feel. Visual design, however, is not just about making a site look good; it can make or break a site’s effectiveness and even its usability. A good visual designer does not simply color in the wireframes; they rearrange elements, adjust relative placement and sizing of elements, and use good graphic-design principles of color, form, consistency, and layout to accentuate navigation and important content, and indicate how users should interact with each

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