The basics

I’ve seen it so often in the past, and am seeing it again now working with a Keys business owner trying to redesign his own website: most folks don’t realize how incredibly useful and valuable it can be to think hard about who your site visitors are, carefully analyze their content needs, and clearly visualize how you want them to interact with your site (the navigation) BEFORE you design how the site will look (page lay-outs, colors, fonts, etc.). Unless you follow at least a few basic sequential steps and produce at least a few basic planning and design documents (content inventory, sitemap, wireframes, etc.)–even just simple pencil sketches and diagrams–you can easily find yourself going around in frustrating circles and wasting a lot of time and money as words and images and links and pages all mill about in your mind like a school of feeding fish. Here’s my favorite cartoon on the subject:

the_class