Development process

Website development questions impact on your organisation in a number of ways. In terms of your ‘outbound’ communications you need to think about what messages you want people to hear; your website is also the one place for all the facets of your organisation to co-exist coherently.

Internally there are decisions to be made about who has responsibility and control over designing and publishing your web content. The people involved in web development might be designers, writers, web developers and project managers, some of these may be internal, others may be external consultants.

There are two ways of delivering websites;

• ‘Static’, which are simple web sites that hardly change and don't have alot of content. You can build this in software such as Nvu which don’t require the installation of a database. In order to edit static websites you need to edit the HTML (the code that enables the text to be displayed in your web browser) directly in Nvu or other software and then re-upload the content to your web server.
• ‘Content management systems’, which are better for dynamic websites with alot of content that you want to be able to change frequently and easily. These require a database such as Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla or Plone. These systems offer you more flexibility and features such as permissions which mean that different members of staff can update different areas of the site. They also offer an easy-to-use online interface to edit website content which means staff members don’t need to use HTML.

Graphic design process

The graphic design of your site will convey your organisational identity. Most sites will require two basic designs, on for the home page and a second for lower level pages.

A standard process is as follows;

• Create ‘wireframe’ sketches of your page layout. These wireframes will allow you to finalise the page layout, without any artwork or content placed. This means you will have already decided on the page structure and how interactions will work before you work on the graphics.
• Work on how users will interact with the content. Will you have one menu at the side of the content? or will you split content up into sub-menus? Think about how users will find your content and you will add to it in the future. Have a look at other websites that are similar in size and scope to yours, get some ideas from others on how to structure this.
• Choose a colour palette and graphics that convey the goals and personality of your organisation and match with your other publications or branding. Work with a graphic designer to establish a look and feel for your site, or if you feel confident - try it yourself.
• Generate templates from the final design that can be filled in with content.

_{This material is based on the eAdvocacy Training materials produced by Aspiration in partnership with Radical Designs which are used with their kind permission and have been added to and adapted for this guide. These materials are distributed under a Creative Commons license: Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5.}