Site Seeing: The Beginning

Back when I was a wee lad, rather, just about to enter my teenage years we received the internet at home. As I frantically searched the web for the latest video game codes, I remember how some of those web pages were setup. I had entered the web during the beginning of the "Image & Table" era according to Wroblewski. There would be a main image of perhaps some famous video game character, like Mario or something and a neatly organized collection of links in a table format. I could navigate through the entire site through this table and with the help of my back button. Now after looking at all these different era's on the web, they all now stand out in my mind and we have come a long way with web web development.

When we create a website, we need to know what it is going to say, or the content of it. Not just the text that is going to be on the site, but also how it should be presented, the color choices, the fonts, graphic images, etc. This is helped to be determined by finding the target audience for the website. What is the audience looking for? What about the client? What is the purpose for someone to go to that site? The example in the book talks about a user going to the Williams-Sonoma website. Their website is dedicated to cook-ware and food recipes. That means that the target audience is most likely a person who has at the very least, a little bit of knowledge about cooking and food. So the appropriate lingo can be used. If the user is looking for cook-ware to purchase, making it easy to find the desired cook-ware and to purchase it are a main concern, as well as displaying the object the best it can be via the web browser.

After figuring out what the desired outcome and purpose of the site is, collect all the thoughts on paper and develop a short mission statement to help outline what the site needs to do and who it is for.