Starting a new website can be fairly daunting. There are so many things to think about!
A lot of these things you may not have considered yet. Think about so many of the sites that you look at on a regular basis. They have many common features. They will usually have a contact area where we can make contact with the author in some way, shape or form. This may be an email address, phone number or (as is increasingly the case) some kind of contact form that you need to type into to get a message to the site’s owner.
There is also an “About” page on most sites, as well as some kind of listing that lets you look at the policies of the site. These may relate to privacy, what the site will do with information that it collects about you or mechanisms for you to share material that you find interesting with your friends via social media.
In the footer of this site, you will find a few links that will take you to different facilities offered by Melba Secondary College. Ones that are very well recognised will have their own icon (such as Facebook). The generic link icon will appear for the others but I’m sure that you will recognise most of them from the web address that will appear at the bottom of your web browser. Try to make a note of characteristics that you consistently find across sites that you enjoy. These may be worth including on your own site.
The success of your site will depend on its content and the degree to which you structure it and design it to get a response from users. This is called a “call to action“. It’s where you try to get your users to do something on your site. This can range from leaving a comment to purchasing an item or even clicking a particular button to do something. Maybe downloading something.
A successful site will have worthwhile content that offers something unique and special to the site’s visitors. You have picked a theme and topic that is important to you. The question is, can you get your passion across to your audience?
It can be a little bit tricky to organise all of the goals of your website in such a way that you create a cohesive design. You absolutely need to think about two things right at the start:
- Your audience, and
- what you want them to get out of your site.
This planning task is designed to help you organise your thoughts, your media and your textual content to prepare to create a great design using the theme and plug-ins that you have chosen. You picked your theme for a reason. Are you able to translate that into a successful site?
To get started, let’s think about the reason you’re making your site, the audience you are trying to reach and what you want that audience to get out of your content.
You can either download the planning worksheet from the shop (at the standard Melba Secondary College rate of zero dollars) or download it here.
This is worth 50 marks and gets its own grade. The importance of your planning cannot be overemphasised.
After doing your planning you will create your content (pages and posts) and upload material to your media library to insert into those pages and posts. I know that writing text is not the favourite thing of many students but it is quite critical to you making your site your own. It needs to reflect your personality and passions. We will also need to create categories and tags for your articles/posts/pages.
Think of your website as being like a book. Categories are the chapters in your book whilst tags are search terms that people can use to search within those chapters. These can take quite a bit of thinking about but your brainstorming about keywords to do with your site is a very good place to start.
Yep, it all comes back to planning.
Finally, we will use plug-ins and widgets to insert your material into your site and the most effective way possible. This will take some practice as there is more than one way to present your material in some ways will be more successful than others. The only way that you will be able to tell how successful your site is is to get feedback from your users. The comments area in the blog section is good for this.
Speaking of comments areas, please feel free to leave a response on this post letting me know how you went with the planning sheet supplied to you. If the sheet can be improved please let me know so that I can make it better for future classes. If you struggled with any particular areas and you are comfortable with other members of the class (or even the world) knowing which areas gave you trouble please let me know in the comments below. Be aware that fake names and emails associated with comments will result in the comment being deleted forthwith.
Please do not underestimate the importance of this particular task. The care that you put into it will hugely impact how meaningful and useful your final website is.