I know, I know… I’m supposed to be working on cleaning up my old sites, adding new content to them and making them easier to update when I’m on the road. Plus I should really be using this time to look a bit further into some tax issues and maybe even learn a bit more CSS. What am I doing instead? I’m doing what I love to do – building a new site from scratch.
This is my favourite thing about web development and now that I’ve got a great new domain in Wanderstruck.com, I’m pretty eager to get all creative on its ass. I thought it might be useful to know what sorts of things go through my head at this stage and how I go from a blank canvas to the beginnings of a website.
- Get a list of potential categories – Before I can decide on layout or navigation I need to have a rough idea of how I’m going to organise things. In this case the site will be a travel magazine, guide and blog combo so I’ll need bits for feature articles, static guides, a blog bit and a travel map that will tie into the blog. As time goes on I will alter this list by combining certain categories or taking things away altogether but I need to have a few major areas defined before I can move on.
- Look at similar sites – At this point I’ll have a look at other sites that might be similar to what I have in mind and see if they’re doing anything interesting that might fit well with my site idea. I’m not saying copy other sites, but checking to see how they’re organised usually gives me a lot of ideas on how I’d like to arrange my own content. I usually see lots of good ideas and think of ways to improve upon them or adapt them to fit with my ideas. I do this with as many other sites as you can and eventually I start to get my head around a navigation system to use. This is also a good way to see if there are any categories I missed out on that might fit well with the content I want to offer.
- Develop a navigation system – This is actually one of my favourite things to do which is surprising to me because it’s really just a paper exercise. I think having a logical, intuitive navigation system is very important and if I can’t get it right from the start it can be a nightmare to fix later on so I put a lot of time into this. At this point I should have a list of major categories and some minor stuff too like ‘about’, ‘contact’, ‘advertising’ etc. I’ll have an idea of how I want the major sections to interact with one another and will start doing some sketches with lines shooting all over the place and navigation lists popping up everywhere. After this point I will have a good idea about my layout.
- Design the layout – This has nothing to do with the actual aesthetics of the site. It’s about defining sections and where chunks of information will go on each page. It’s closely tied in with the navigation and I’ll tend to change bits of both and juggle things around to come up with a design and navigation that work together.
To me this is where a website is really made. I will get a shell of a site up and test it before any graphics or content are even created. This used to be pretty straightforward back when I was building sites using only HTML but now I want to kick things up a notch. In the past, once all these steps were finished I would just build the site with HTML. Now, I know I’m going to have hours of wrestling with WordPress and CSS to get things exactly how I want them.
This is something I need to learn anyways and I’m sort of looking forward to and dreading the challenge all at the same time. Wish me luck!
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