Business site design need to know

Design | Site Successful commercial site, must be able to put the site's business needs, internet technology and the site's art design is well integrated together. Therefore, the establishment of a commercial web site, both need to have Internet technology application developers, but also need to have the company's business personnel and professional art of the reference. At present, the talent market is very popular site designer (Webarchitect), is able to communicate with these three people fully, assume a commercial site construction projects, and in the project to organize, assign work and coordination of people.
So, as a site designer, how to obtain customer needs? How to communicate with art staff? In this article, I would like to share my experience with you on these two issues.

Communicate fully with business personnel to establish site objectives

Good site designers should first have a clear goal: your task is to make this site successful. What is success? Each industry may have different standards, but for the commercial web site, there is one of the most basic measure: your site, must be able to attract your target users, and thus bring you profits. So, the first thing a site designer should do is: know what you're going to do with this site. In this process, you have to do a few things:

• Write down the goal of the website

• Identify your target customers

• Refine your goals to determine the content of your site

• Organize the site logical structure diagram

In addition, you should also select the information content and image resources needed to achieve the goal.

1. Write down the purpose of the site clearly:

By communicating with business people, it is important to write down the purpose of the site that you are trying to establish, which is a step that can be easily overlooked or belittled by people. Especially when you are working as a foreign aid to help other companies set up a site, but you do not have the industry experience of the enterprise, and the site on behalf of the company's business personnel communication is more important.

For the design of a business site, this communication is not limited to understanding what the site is running applications, how to connect the company's existing systems, and so on, you also need to know what the site would like to get a business purpose, that is, you have to know where your target market is. This will be the basis for all design ideas throughout the site. Regardless of your site in what form, what kind of appearance, provide what content, should be based on the ultimate goal of the site as a starting point to consider.

You should also collect the customer's art needs for this site. If the company has a carefully established corporate image, and their site will want to continue this image, then, you need to understand, they always want to highlight what kind of impression, the company's logo have what characteristics, meaning and so on, the best you can get their CI design manual, which is very useful for creative artists. If the company wants to be able to change their image through the site, you also need to be aware of what new features they want to appear. Generally speaking, business people will have a general idea in mind, such as the site is trendy or solemn, as much as possible to understand their ideas, will make your final design easier to satisfy them.

2. Identify your customers:

It is important to identify the target customers of your site, especially for business sites. Only clearly identify who is the customer of the site, what they need, and what their interests are. You will be able to provide the content and information they need on the site. Your site can be successful only if your site attracts your target customers and keeps them with the information you provide.

As an example of an online bank, if your target customer is an individual, you may need to provide more personal finance, advice, and consumer information; If your target is a corporate customer, you may need to provide more information such as financial advice, investment advisor, and more. That is, you need to create a circle of interest to highlight your value among the target audience.

3. Refine the goal to organize the site content framework

Once you have identified the target market and the customer, you should refine your objectives and initially sort out all the content that your site needs to contain to achieve these goals. For example, what information the site should publish, what applications the site needs to provide, and so on. Then, you should write down the preliminary outline of the content, to the superior or business staff to review and approve. This actually forms the requirements report for the site design. In your content outline, you should also indicate the source of information about the content and which department should provide the information. Listing these will make it clear to the superiors and the relevant departments "Who should be responsible for the content".

4. Further organize the site logical structure diagram

After you have set the content outline, you should be able to sketch out the structure of the site. There are also many kinds of structure diagrams, sequential structure, network structure, inheritance structure, web structure, etc., should be based on your content. For example, if you are making a tutorial, it might be appropriate to use a flowchart that represents the order. Most complex web sites are integrated into several different structure diagrams. The purpose of drawing a structure diagram is to easily organize sites and links logically, and in the future you will use this diagram to assign jobs and tasks. For example:

You can tell a developer to complete the contents of a branch in the chart.

You can submit this map to the business staff, tell them which pages, need them to further provide content or information;

You can show the structure to the professional artists, so that the artist to consider in what form to express the content you want to say and so on.

In short, this frame chart will provide you with a basis for your next job assignment and staffing arrangements.

You should also realize that Web site building will be a continuous process, it is not a static data only the same project. Therefore, the site plan should also include long-term version management and technical maintenance. Here are some of the issues you should consider:

1, the site structure is reasonable, in order to adapt to future development,

For example, some important functional modules may not be available at the beginning of the release but will certainly be in the future, you should reserve the interface in the structure diagram, and even put on the static page of the nature of the introduction. The advantage of doing this is that for yourself, the logic is clear, the expansion is easy, and for the viewer, it will not be confused by the site's structural adjustment.

2, the content of the site and image resources how to maintain

When the site content increased, maintenance of the site's resources will also be difficult, especially when the site by many people jointly developed, the picture of the resource distribution will be very messy, so it is necessary to establish some standards, the image resources organized storage and arrangements.