1.7 Website Goals - Goals Of Building a Website

Before you start building your website, it is important that you have an idea of what goals you want to achieve with it. This will help you make decisions in better way.

Your goals could be things such as attracting attention, making money, or making it just for your first client. If you are going to build this for your client, you need to inquire the goals they want to achieve with the website. Start by examining some of your favourite websites. For example: Website Tata Motors (see below) has a goal to provide information about its vehicles as well as to sell them to the customers.

Tata Motors Homepage

Organizing Websites

While figuring out the structure of your site, you need to think about the sites as a whole and as individual pages also. Remember that a website is just a collection of web pages. So, if you have all the pages, then there will be unity in the site itself.

If every page is different, the site visitor might get lost. Say, if you have 8-page website and 8 different styles for each, then maximum chances are of the user getting puzzled.

The following sample might be taken overview of the website.

1. On a blank piece, draw a box in the centre and put Home Page in it.
2. Draw some boxes around the Home Page box for subtopics you want to cover on the website.
3. In these subtopics are further divided, add those topics to the page using additional boxes.
4. Draw lines connecting these pages to the Home Page box.
5. Draw line from the subtopics of each page to the page itself.

Now you have a rough map of what you want to do on your website.

Note-

A home page is the first page someone sees when they open a website. Keeping in mind that people do not stay long at any website (usually few seconds) so this is place where they get the first impression.

Organizing the Pages

In the same way as the site, begin organizing each web page with a hand drawn template. Keep it as simple as possible so that you can make each page look like a unified page in a website.

1. On another blank piece of paper, draw a rectangle that is more in length than width and fills most of the page. This rectangle represents a web page that is viewed with a typical browser on a typical screen.
2. At the top of this page, draw a horizontal line across the page, about 15% of the way down. This is your header.
3. At the bottom of this page, draw another horizontal line across the page, about 15% of the way up. This is your footer.
4. Add a rough outline of how you want your content to look on your site. You might want to have columns or tables. Take some time and express your creativity like you did while organizing a website.

Header and Footer

The header and footer sections of the page are the same for every page. Normally, you’ll find links to other pages and contact information in the header and footer.

Note

You may have the same organizational structure for your whole website or you might have couple of different ones for different parts. Let your content define the structure.