ENTRY #8

CREATING A WEBSITE 

Nothing is going to be easy when it required coding to make it fully functional. When it comes to building a website, it requires coding in it. Its either a lot of coding or just some simple one. But for sure there is going to be coding in it. So it won't be that easy to build one fully functional website.

HTML/CSS coding

 There are numerous process that need to be done when building a fully functional website. From idea brainstorming, to the creation of your website and finally to the maintenance stage where the designer need to keep their website up to date and current. 

The exact process will vary slightly from a designer to a designer. But overall, the basics of building a website are still going to be the same. Like for me, I like to practice using 6 simple phase when building a website. It is easier to do when you have a plan for it. 

The 6 phase that I've mention above is 

1. Information gathering / brainstorming
2. Planning
3. Design
4. Development
5. User testing 
6. Maintenance

PHASE 1 :Brainstorming

The first phase when it comes to building a website is to gather all of the information regarding about the website that you going to create. Many things need to be taken in consideration when the look and feel of your website is created. 

The first phase is the most important part of creating a website. Without a good start, there won't be a good ending. Other than that, there will be a lot of answers that need to be found which are related to the clients before we even start creating a website for them. We can't be designing the website based on our preference, we need to always remind our self that the clients is the one that is hiring us to create it them, not us.

"Good web design is about the character of the content, not the character of the designer" -Jeffrey Zeldman

There are certain things that need to be consider are:

• PURPOSE

What is the purpose of the website? is it used to sell a product, as an informative site, or used as a service provider through the web‏ 

• GOAL

What is the main target for the website? Most of the common goal for every websites is either to make money out of it or to share information

• TARGET AUDIENCE

Is there any specific groups of people that you need to help you reaching your goal? Teenagers? Adults? Male? Female..?  

• CONTENT

What is the thing that is going to be in your website? It is better if you can think of what the user is going to be looking for in your website

PHASE 2 :Planning

From all of the information that you have gathered from phase one, put all of them together and start planning for your website. This is where you as web designer need to prepare a mood board / site map.

The purpose of the mood board is to guide the designer on what is the list of things that they will be using in the process of the website making, such as, what is the main topic and sub-topic for it?

PHASE 3 :Design

From the information that you gathered up to this point, it is time to determine the look and feel for the website. One of the main factor that is going to be focus on is the target audiences. Different groups of people have different preference. For an example, some of the guys won't be visiting a 'girly' theme website or an old man won't be visiting a gaming site. Because of that, target audience are one of the main factor for designing your web interface. 

The next thing you need decide is which software you will be using during the process of creating this website, some of the software that is commonly use in the web design industry is either Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator (AI). Other than that, you need to be sure that the image or information is clearly visible for the user. It is easy if you make a template for your website so that you won't keep changing style during the process of designing the website.

After all, the overall design for your website is very important. A good user interface creates an easier way to navigate the website. For my opinion, simple design is the best design.

PHASE 4 :Development

After you have decided on what to do in the planning and designing phase, you can start working on creating the website. Here is when the coding comes into play. In this phase, the designer need mastered on how to code. 

For some of people out there that thought creating a website is an easy job, it is not. It happens to me once where I thought it is an easy job for creating a website until I experience it myself,  I have never been so wrong. 

On the technical front, during the process of creating a website, the designer are required to understand the front-end of web development. This involves writing certain valid code such as HTML, CSS(Cascading Style Sheets),  JAVASCRIPT,  JS QUERY that complies to current web standard.

This is tested on the next phase...

PHASE 5 :User testing

At this point, the web designer will attend to the final details and test the website, where they need to check to be sure that all of the code written for their website validates  and see if there is any bug or malfunction for the website. 

PHASE 6 :Maintenance 
The development of the website is not over, yet. The designer still need to make sure that the website is up to date so that the user/visitor won't get bored from visiting the website.