The Web design will determine its organizational framework. At
this stage you will make the tactical web design
decisions about what your audience wants from your web
design, what you wish to say, and how to arrange the
content to best meet your audience's web design needs.
Although people will notice the graphic web design of
your Web pages right away, the overall organization of
the web design will have the greatest impact on their
experience.
The
fundamental organizing principle in Web design is
meeting users' needs. Ask yourself what your audience
wants, and center your web design on their needs. Many
organizations and businesses make the mistake of using a
Web design primarily to describe their administrative
organization, and only secondarily do they offer on
their web design the services, products, and information
the average user is seeking. Most readers won't care how
your company or department is organized and will be put
off if such inside information is all your site appears
to offer in its web design. Talk to the people who make
up your target audience, put yourself in their shoes,
and make the items and services they want the most
prominent items on the home page of your web design.
Organizing information
Our
day-to-day professional and social lives rarely demand
that we create detailed architectures of what we know
and how those structures of information are linked in
the web design. Yet without a solid and logical
organizational foundation, your Web design will not
function well even if your basic content in the web
design is accurate, attractive, and well written.
Cognitive psychologists have known for decades that most
people can hold only about four to seven discrete chunks
of information in short-term memory. The way people seek
and use reference information also suggests that
smaller, discrete units of information are more
functional and easier to handle than long,
undifferentiated tracts.
There are
five basic steps in organizing your information in web
design:
- Divide the
content of web design into logical units
- Establish a
hierarchy of importance among the units in the web
design
- Use the
hierarchy in web design to structure relations among
units
- Build a web
design that closely follows your information structure
- Analyze the
functional and aesthetic success of your web design
system
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