Building a Web site first seemed like a daunting task. In my experience the most important step when designing a site is the planning process. The first step in the planning process is to understand the needs of audience you are targeting and to delineate the goal of the Web site.  My Web site was developed to serve the patrons of an Academic library with the goal of providing users with information and resources on how to identify and distinguish scholarly journals from popular magazinesstory1

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 Having defining my audience and the objectives of my Web site I was able to create a storyboard in order to plan the flow of the Web site. Storyboarding was an effective step that forced me to take an even closer look at my audience and critically evaluate my goals. During this segment of the process I was able to further flush out ideas to ensure that the navigational flow is effective and that information is grouped in an intuitive and user friendly manner. Once I had completed my storyboard it became the blueprint for me to begin developing my pages.  I also wanted all of my pages to be linked and for navigation to be consistent across all pages to ensure a consistence look, feel and functionality I first designed a main page with would become the template for all of my other pages. (I later learned that use cascading style sheets would also produce this consistent feel and allow me to quickly make future changes to all sheets simultaneously.)

On this main page I included standard navigation bars that appear at both the top and bottom of all of the pages as well as a date notation that indicated the date the page is updated. Using this strategy ensured that all pages share the same color scheme, lay-out style, and fonts.

To populate my Web site the content was adapted and from material that I had gathered and created for another GSLIS class. The storyboarding process helped me and organization the existing information that I had an to organize into smaller summary paragraphs that would provide readers with a clear definition and that could be linked to related definitions. During this editing process it was helpful for me to draw upon experiences that I have had while navigation other Web sites to ensure that my planned information flow was smooth and intuitive.

Having worked through all of the in class exercises I felt well prepared to begin coding my Web pages. With the help of Wendy Lehnert’s HTML book, the class exercises and a few on-line tutorials the coding was a pretty simple process. 

The best advice that I would have to anyone beginning this process and that may feel a little intimidated at the idea of creating a webpage or a multi paged Web site is to break each page down into a series of smaller projects and work through each projects one at a time.  Each of these mini projects could even be identify on your storyboard. Your first project may be to create a header, then to add a link to another site or add a picture, or to build a table. One you have completed you first page then, move on and begin programming you next page. Once you have completed you first page go back and review it and don’t be afraid modify it if you feel a different design would better serve the web sites users.

Overall I found that building a website is very much like writing a research paper; the better prepared and organized that you are the easier the process and the better the ultimate outcome.

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