Architectural Ecology

This is your store front window

How will we use the text and graphics to effectively turn users into buyers?

•What do I want people to know about my organization?

What is the mission statement?  What are the goals?

•What products or services am I offering?

How do they help people? How do people use them?

•How do customers order my products or services?

•What information can I send to customers if they request it?

•Can I provide answers to frequently asked questions?

•Can I provide information that is more timely, useful, or effective than other marketing materials, such as brochures or pamphlets offer?

 

Architectural Ecology The Design Interface

Integrating design specifications and creating a functional web site is no longer point and click editing or layout. Anybody with a computer and a web authoring tool can create a web site and call themselves a webmaster.

What are the considerations in designing a business web site and what information do we include?

A good place to begin deciding what you want to include is to take a look at materials you already have on hand.  For example, marketing materials such as, catalogs, flyers, newspapers ads, etc., often include information about the company, products, and services suitable for use on a Web site.
So How we build the site depends on the content available (structural material). Layout, formatting, appearence, and content dynamics will all be considered is this phase of the development of your web site.

The design must be able to integrate engineering princples to develope interactive forms, generating dynamic database systems, billing methods, invoicing, customer relations management(CRM).

We are now to the point where it becomes web site engineering and Just like any brick and mortor business your store front window is what brings in foot traffic in other words the location of the building and the doorway, does it allow easy access.

The integration of text and graphics is as important to developing new contacts as is the registration of your site with the search engines, visibility of the site means nothing if people are easily bored and you can't hold their attention.

Planning

The first step in building any well designed and worthwhile web site is planning!   If you do not take the time to get out some old-fashioned paper and a pencil to sketch out what you want your Web Site to look like you will end up like thousands of other site developers out there, who spend more time redoing the content they already have on their web site then they spend putting up new content for their audience to enjoy.  This is possibly the worst rut any web site can get stuck in.  As much as people enjoy seeing fresh 'material(displays), the bottom line is they have come to a web site to gather information about your products and services.

If you are not adding any new information to your site then you leave your audience no reason to return!

What does your audience want?

When you visit a Web site, you usually have a reason for going there. Although you often stumble onto a site that interests you while you're browsing, you normally have something specific in mind when you start. Thus, as you begin planning, you will want to think about what visitors expect to see at your site. If you needed what it is you plan to offer on your web site, what questions would you need answers to?  What information would you want to see?  How would you want it to look?  Do you already know of potential visitors, if so, ask them what they would like to see.

What do you want to provide?

In a perfect virtual world your web site would provide all the information that your visitors want; however, what they want isn't necessarily what you can or want to provide.   For example, you might not want to publicize a product's unstable repair history, or a competitors cheaper rates.  If you are selling a book it probably is not a wise choice to place the entire contents of the book on-line.  If you are selling a service, you may not want to tell your customers how to do everything you do on their own.

 

Maintenance Planning: Initial Phase

Although maintaining your documents after you create them and throughout their existence on your site is a separate issue all together, you also need to include maintenance in the initial Planning that we are doing now.  This is even more true if you answer yes to any of the following questions:

•Will more than one person be involved in developing the content?
•Will more than one person play an active role in maintaining the site?
•Will your site include more than about 20 HTML documents?
•Will you frequently add or modify a significant numbers of pages--say, more than 20-25 percent of the total number of documents?

Planning for Content Maintenance

If you will be depending on others for content, you need to make arrangements at the onset for how you will obtain updates.  Will content providers actually develop and update the Web pages, or will they simply send you new information via e-mail?  You need to plan accordingly if they are going to merely send you a publication (for example, the annual report) and expect you to figure out what has changed.  Planning now how you will handle constant revisions and updates will save you time (and grief) later.

Planning for Site Maintenance

Regardless of whether you or someone else will maintain the site you develop, you need to carefully document the development process and include the following information:

•The site's purpose and goals •The process you used to determine the content •Who provides the content •How the site is laid out (as you build keep notes: images are in the graphics directory, archives are stored in the archive directory, hardcopy of passwords, E-Mail address' etc...)

Documenting the development process will help those who maintain the site later, whether it's you or someone else, to fill the position correctly and keep everything up-to-date.


Taking the time to organize the information carefully is often the difference between having frequent visitors to your site and having none at all! How often do you return to a site that is not well organized?  If you can not find what you need easily and quickly, you have no reason to go there, and the same will be true of visitors to your site.

After you answer these and any other questions that are helpful in your situation, you should be able to develop a list of what you want to provide. 

You may well find that visitors want information that you simply can not provide.   For example, they might want to know product release dates or be privy to product previews, which is probably information your company doesn't want to disclose.  other times, you might want to provide your audience with information that they do not necessarily care about.  For example, you might want to tell people that your company received a big award or just reached one million in sales this year -- certainly interesting information that's good for marketing, but it is not on your visitors' priority list.  What you want and what your visitors want do not always coincide.

[Home] [Marketing Ecology] [Advertising Ecology] [Web Site Ecology][Architectural Ecology] [Navigational Ecology] [Services] [Billing] [Contact ]

AIME Consulting
PO Box 1501
Philomath OR 97370
1 541 929-7302
Copyright © 2000
All Rights Reserved.