Site Design
Planning Your Website Redesign
Redesigning a website for your organization can be a daunting task, particularly if your content is out-of-date or disorganized. Our detailed Redesign Process will explain everything step by step from discovery to launch.
Content Strategy
Early on and throughout the design process, Web Strategies will address content strategy for your website. This topic includes three aspects: business analysis, messaging/search and accessibility.
Business analysis includes a meeting to talk about specific business use for the website, such as public relations, increasing revenue, increasing efficiency for support, and so on. This will help define the use for every page on the website.
Messaging and search includes a meeting to look at drafted content, look at the focus of a message based on a business goal, addressing readability and developing effective metadata for search.
Accessibility includes looking at images as well as links to see how you can preserve the message for all audiences no matter how they come to your site. It also includes tagging for acronyms or abbreviations.
Resources and Sample Documents
Page Inventory
A page inventory is a document that helps you organize the content that you will have on your Web site. Essentially just a table or spreadsheet, a page inventory shows the areas of content on each page of your site, arranged according to the navigation on the site.
Page Inventory Template (includes sheets with instructions, examples)
Information Architecture
Information Architecture (IA) is the conceptual design of your site. It consists of a site map (the organization of individual pages in a site, often viewed in "org chart" format) and wireframes made in Microsoft Visio which are like the blueprint for where specific pieces of information will be located on the page.
These documents are the roadmap to a successful Web site, providing a way to organize complex information. If you don't have Visio, you can also create a site map in Word or PowerPoint; think of creating a "table of contents" for your site, where each line represents what word will appear in the left navigation. Email Us and we will send you Word templates to use for designing your homepage.
Quality Assurance
Quality Assurance (QA) is the process through which pages go to ensure they conform to Web Strategies' Visual Identity Guidelines. This checklist is for CommonSpot authors to use while creating and editing content on their website to improve the look of the page as well as user experience.
