This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Building a website
Feed Title: Michael Lucas-Smith
Feed URL: http://www.michaellucassmith.com/site.atom
Feed Description: Smalltalk and my misinterpretations of life
Building a website should be easy right? - Wrong. Gosh, where to begin. That's one of the main problems. Do you start with Look and Feel? Structure? Content? Metaphor? Well, turns out you need to start with at least some sort of metaphor.
The two main metaphors for websites are these: Pamphlet and Encyclopedia.
The Encyclopedia is the most common website metaphor around. The idea of this website is to be a vast store of information both useful and non-useful. Most peoples 'my homepage' websites also try to be encyclopedia's. Most company websitse are also encyclopedia's. This is often the worst metaphor for a website - because now every one has to invent some way of presenting encyclopedic information.
The Pamphlet is another fairly common website. Those websites that are pamphlets are usually done that way by design. Somebody has sat down and though "What is the message I most desperately want to get out to the people". The majority of Pamphlet websites become little more than an advert though.
So you have to find a balance between the two. Let's assume you've decided your website does have a message after all (most do), then you need to work the website structure around this concept. The encyclopedic website usually has some sort of drill in topic mapped hierarchy of knowledge (and many more buzzwords where those came from), while the pamphlet website focuses firstly on a primary message and has only one layer off that for more detail. It may then have sections related to that primary message.
Now that you know your structure, designing your look and feel is easier, because you know what concepts the L F needs to support. In a blog, for example, the concept of an 'entry' is needed, or for a news site, the concept of some 'news' is needed, etc. Now we leave our analytical skills behind and put on our artists hat and play with CSS and The Gimp. Again, things start getting hard. You have two approaches you can take.
Concept graphics: You know what kind of concepts your website is going to preach, thus you make specific images related to that topic.
Minimalistic graphics: You want your graphics to work with any kind of information set.
The encyclopedia almost always wants the minimalistic set.. and the pamphlet - well, if you're a graphics designer then I'm sure you're verry comfortable doing concept graphics for a website, like the peolpe at zengarden. So, usually a website ends up with a minimalistic graphics set.
Now we need our content, so take off your artistic beret and put on your authors coat. If you're going to write an encyclopedic website, you either try to write a novel now or let it build up over time. If you're going write a pamphlet website, every word you choose is very important.
Likely, you'll need to review the content with other members of a team and eventually you'll end up with the result. And after all that hard work, you'll have your website.
And that's the world I've been living in since Smalltalk Solutions - trying to get the WithStyle Developers Program up and live. It's now up there, at softwarewithstyle.com and I'll be posting an official news notice about it to this blog shortly.
So next time someone tells you making a website is easy and they'll do it for you - accept :)
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