Thad Gembczynski's Profile

Second, creating a prototype allows the graphic designers to develop relations between how the site looks and how the navigation interface supports the information design.

you should develop page templates for your new web site. It’s much easier to add new pages when you can start from a page that already contains basic navigation and site graphics

Use the guidelines and techniques developed and maintained by the Web Accessibility Initiative (wai) as a measure against which to test the accessibility of your pages

Making sure that web sites are accessible and usable by people with disabilities is the focus of web accessibility.

Testing should be done primarily by people outside your site development team who are willing to supply informed criticism and report programming bugs, note typographic errors, and critique the overall design and effectiveness of the site.

Adobe Dreamweaver) produce html code that is easy for web programmers to read

url for your site should appear on every piece of correspondence and marketing collateral your organization generates.

Your home page url should appear in all:

Links on the web are perishable, and you’ll need to check periodically that links to pages outside your immediate site are still working. Don’t let your site go stale by starving it of resources just as you begin to develop an audience—if you disappoint them by not following through, it will be doubly difficult to attract your audience back to the site.

be sure that the web site is regularly backed up onto a secure and reliable storage medium

If the blog metaphor of posted-content-plus-reader-comments doesn’t suit your purpose, turn off the comments features and you have a friendly web site development and editing tool plus a lightweight cms in one inexpensive package.

wikis allow all users to change the content of the wiki pages, not just to post comments about the content

url (uniform resource locator

Google Docs

Microsoft’s SharePoint

privacy of Google’s applications and services remain in question, particularly for sensitive enterprise documents, financial information, and other private content.

SharePoint is a portal-like web-based collaboration, publishing, and document management system

it’s hard to find local enterprise tools that are as capable or user-friendly as Flickr or Picasa for image sharing. More specialized web tools such as SurveyMonkey’s free or inexpensive survey tools are now widely used

Any web-based software service entails risk to enterprise security, information privacy, and even intellectual property rights of material posted through the service

Small is good.

form follows function

Avoid gimmicky technology fads.

To make your site more interesting, add substantive content or features.

Provide a carefully designed “404” error page with helpful search and links if the user hits a broken link on your site.

Be concise, and be generous with headers, subheads, and lists, so the user can scan your content easily.

Use the active voice at all times, so the user knows who is speaking

If you are redesigning an existing site, take a close look at the web server logs from the server that hosts the site and work with your webmaster to develop reports on how the site is currently used and on trends of use over time. In addition to providing gross traffic volume on your site and your most popular pages, web logs can give you detailed information on where your current users come from, what sites they visited before coming to yours, what search terms brought them to your web site, what kind of network connection they use, what size their computer screen is, and which operating system and web browser they use. If the data from your existing web hosting arrangement isn’t adequate or is poorly formatted for analysis by your team, consider using tools such as Google Analytics to generate easy-to-read reports on your current site traffic as you plan the revised site.

about half of web users prefer to search for keywords, while the other half prefer to browse through pages and lists of links. Your search analytics reports are a powerful feedback tool for assuring that your new design meets the needs of both searchers and browsers.

Group critiques are a great way to explore what makes a web site successful, because everyone on the team sees each site from a user’s point of view.

Content development is the hardest, most time-consuming, and most consistently underestimated part of any web site development project.

Planning diagrams such as wireframes are a crucial means to convey ideas about the site structure.

Unlike the other site development roles described above, the site editor’s role is a long-term job, bridging the transition from a site development project into an ongoing web publication process that maintains the web site after launch and keeps the content fresh and relevant to your audience.