Website Planning Help

Question

There are a lot of posts on this but I'm kinda looking for specific help, I've typed many different queries into Google but the majority of page returns seem to be dominated by beginner tutorials, planning, generators, and lots of other rubbish related information, It may have something to do with that fact that I'm rubbish at searching for content on search engines, but that's besides the point!

I'm just about to endeavour on an adventure to create a pretty stylish looking, very functional, adaptable website.

But I don't want to miss anything out.

Its happened too many times where I've come up with an idea, planned, planned, designed, implemented, then realised I've missed something, or something's wrong and I've had to turn the website on its head in order to compensate. Im sure other people have had similar situations.

My Question is:

What is everything I need to consider before actually coding my website?

I'm talking from coding standard, implementation, design aspect,abstract point of view.

Currently, I have:

• designed the look of the website.
• Made storyboard like diagrams for every page, action, event.
• invented content.
• designed a style guide.
• mapped animation.
• modularised my functions.
• considered audience.
• considerend diversity (including cross-browser compatibility, screen resolution and font size)
• created a nice directory
  
  AND FINALLY...
• have included my frameworks (css reset, jQuery, images, wordpress, etc)

Is There anything else? What am I not considering?

I just wanted to make sure I've covered every aspect before I sit down (with my brand new coffee machine) and code like a fairy on crack.

If anybody has come across any worthy articles... Please share.

But please, no "how to make a website" beginner articles. Purely in the context of the question.

Personal preferences and responses are preferred!

What planning/design steps do you take before embarking on a monster website mission?

Thank you for reading this long ASS boring question

Alex

Answer 1

I think your points are ok, but you should make some considerations.

First of all, before thinking about anything, you should consider the most important aspect of your website: audience.

When you have the audience, you can then define another really important aspect: What the audience wants or expect from your website. Or perhaps what kind of content you want to deliver to them.

Those two aspect are critical.

Once you set those two points, you have to think about the functionalities your website needs: is it a static website? does it needs to work with a database to store user data? user interactions? AJAX?

When you have this in mind, you can think about which technologies to use: HTML or XML? Which server language and database? Which server?

Next step: actually start to design your website. Take a paper and a pen, or your preferred software and start to draw some tables and schemas. Where should I put the login and registration? What users expect to see when they first land on my home page? Is the navigation easy to access and immediate? Try to make the user interface look as clear as possible, the content easy to access and the users will be happy. Also, try to avoid too much fancy stuff.

When you have the picture, you can start coding.

These are my personal steps, and it's been pretty good until now.

Answer 2

A few glaring things that I'm not seeing in your considerations:

1. Version Control - you may be using this, but how does it fit into your deployment schedule?
2. Deployment - how are you going to implement new changes? If you're thinking by FTP, you may want to reconsider. You should look at automated deployment that works best with your version control/language of choice.
3. Security - if someone were to come to your site to try and compromise it, how would they do it? SQL? Apache? Some functions that you've left out in the open? Do you need SSL?
4. Testing with your audience - please, for the love of your user, check out http://ux.stackexchange.com and do some testing with your users.

That's pretty much all I can think of right now (its early!).

Answer 3

This may not be applicable to this particular instance of your website (since you mentioned wordpress in the post), but here are some things I noticed missing:

• What about your data model?
• What about entity relationships?

I.e. how does content on your site relate to other content? Do all blog posts have tags? Do blog posts have categories? What's the difference between tags and categories?

Here's an example of a conceptual data model.

Also, have you thought about a favicon? :)

Answer 4

I think the question is the root of your problem.

Do you expect the software project as it is to run without a hitch? I guess not, you will have ways to deal with changes and what not.

Why would you then expect the managment of the project to run without a hitch? Change your approach to deal easily with missed items and mistakes.