9 The realities of website design
Makers of website design software like to make out that it is easy to do. Time for some reality!
Smallsite Design is for making a body of knowledge, whether that be for describing a hobby, explaining a business, comprehensive online help, or just to have a lot to say on various topics. While any of those can be built a page at a time, such sites still need to be structured, and have a way of modifying that structure.
More complex than in the ads△
It takes a lot more than throwing elements at a page to have a working site.
If we want a one-page website, we can just create a social media page. It is a lot easier, and many people are used to navigating themselves around them. Any more, then those platforms start getting in the way of what can be done. They are not designed to host full-blown websites and their complexities, just because they want to be in control of what happens on their platforms. They are not designed to serve us, but keep our customers on their website, while providing as much distraction for them as they can.
Despite all the promoting of drag-and-drop visual interfaces with liberally sprinkling of photos over pages with some few words in between, persuading people to do anything useful requires words, and not just a few of them. Pictures do not make a good narrative, while that is what words do best. Pictures can attract, but words can be used to get into our brains and even change our beliefs. For that word-centric view, the software is better to be more like a word processor, as it better supports the consistent layout paradigm required and the focus on the words as being paramount.
Other than navigation pages, like home pages, the majority of knowledge or narrative based sites have to have words as its basic elements, with its essential tools being paragraphs, lists and tables. Judicious relevant images are used to provide some visual reinforcement, but not to take over the narrative, and certainly not used instead of words. Words inspire imagination and open the doors to peoples' minds. Expect to be mainly writing rather than making picture books.
A site can be built up over time, partly by design, but unless there is an imperative to build it quickly, a lot will be organically as ideas for articles arise while getting on with work or living. The structure will change as new areas of interest arise, while well-established areas will just require updating for relevancy once they have reached a stable knowledge base.
More than a home page△
Any software can build a page, but what does it take to build a site?
A home page is really just to introduce a site, and perhaps the person or business running it, but then provide easy ways of getting to the really interesting parts of the site. As such, they should be pretty short and sweet, and provide just enough incentive to explore further. While graphic design artists try to persuade many to pump many fancy features into home pages, they really need to be basic, with the navigation elements easy to see and action. The idea is that visitors do not stop to look at the scenery, but are expedited in their journey to more interesting pages on the site.
The main pages will be articles, with many words, and whatever else it takes to facilitate the power of those words. The pages themselves need to be able to have a structure, like sections, which have their own sub-topic, but which are easy to skip over if a reader feels they know the material. They also break up the page, making it less overwhelming than what would otherwise be a vast tract of text with few landmarks. Such landmarks make it easy for readers to get back to where they were if interrupted. Sections also help strengthen the narrative by clearly bounding sub-narratives.
There are some other pages which are pretty essential for any substantive site. Every site needs a policies page, especially regarding privacy and use of the site. Then there is the contact page, especially useful if there is a selection of purposes. For any body of knowledge, a glossary helps to bring together many terms that some visitors may not be familiar with. It helps if their entries can be the target of links, and even better if their essential information can be made available within the page, so that their continued understanding of the current page is not interrupted.
While procedures can be made out of simple elements like lists, having purpose-designed pages makes them stand out and better fit-for-purpose, especially if they can be selectively redisplayed to be for expeditious use, learning, or just as a prompt. If they can be linked together to make structured hierarchies with back-tracking, a site can much more integrated with the practical running of a business and its various levels, or explaining how to do what is required for a hobby. Providing multiple choice tests to accompany procedures helps visitors gauge their own knowledge before or after.
If the site can structure its information hierarchically, such as through subsites or categories, then there are the pages that help navigate around those structures by exposing what each of those structural elements contain. If these can be generated without having to explicitly provide links on them, but organically by assigning articles to them, or directly creating articles for them, the less work is required to keep the site discoverable. Being able to easily create custom lists of articles that span various parts of the hierarchy can help to provide other paths of discoverability.
Structured△
A site has to have a structure so that visitors can explore what the site offers.
Categories can group related articles, and having a list of those articles on one page helps with discovery. A list of all categories provides an overview of those. A subsite can group related categories, and if they can have their own home page and navigation, they can allow visitors to keep with only what they are interested in without unnecessary clutter. Such structures allow top-down navigation, which helps with discovery of all that a site has to offer.
Links and more links△
Links make the web, but they also make the site.
Having a consistent way of creating links, be it for creating navigation page links, related pages or sites, and inline links, will facilitate building pervasively integrated sites. This will ensure the site is far easier for visitors to explore what else the site offers, and make the site better for SEO. If the sections and glossary entries as well as the articles themselves can be the target of links, especially by being able to drill down to them in expanding lists, that makes the site easier to integrate without having to create or remember their IDs.
When adding page elements, such as sections or subsections, automatically creating the navigation menus for them minimises maintenance and possible errors. That those added elements have back links to their parent elements automatically added as well facilitates full page navigation. Many cannot use a mouse to navigate, so automatically providing links for keyboard navigation around other elements like lists or tables also helps.
Site management△
A site isn't just the content, but how that content is managed.
Each type of site element will need pages devoted to them to allow managing their exposed information, and the setup data that applies particularly to each of them, some of which may require their own pages. If the facilities provided for each type of element are well designed for the element purpose, they can make it easier to be in charge of them without having to worry about their underlying mechanics.
There are many other aspects of a working site to be managed, such as themes (colours), banners (wording and layout), copyrights, users, passwords, redirects for when page names change, basic settings, and site migration, all of which can be a real pain to setup and manage if left to our own devices. If the pages for each of these have been well designed, with good defaults, they will require minimal management effort and technical understanding.
Managing workflow△
Generating content is a process of creating, reviewing, and editing until it is what is intended.
Content goes through stages. An article is created and initial content entered. It may need a review to ensure what is written is correct. It may then need translations into other languages. This is the work-in-progress (WIP) stage, and there could be many versions generated during this stage. A draft would be created for a review or as a release candidate. If it is alright, a release can be created, whereupon all the WIP versions are not required. This process needs to be supported by the software, otherwise it can get messy to manage.
Restructuring△
Sites evolve, which means being able to restructure them when necessary.
If the site structure mechanism takes care of how links are exposed, the site can be restructured far more easily, especially if it is easy to reassign which elements belong to each other, and move elements between them. Articles themselves will need re-editing from time-to-time, which will require facilities to easily restructure them if they have sections which must have elements moved between them.
Some movements may break links, which will require what can be fixed in some done automatically, but for others, some means of checking links, especially external ones, will help keep the site well integrated, and properly connected to the rest of the web.
Heavy-weight sites△
eCommerce and other heavy-weight sites ramp up the technical requirements.
eCommerce, or any site dealing with embedded gateways, will require substantial technical assistance to set up, and probably to maintain. A lot of what happens with them will be in the hands of those people, and be subject to their timing for management. If the knowledge-management content is part of the same software, that will also be subject to their timing. Consider running the knowledge content in a separate subdomain, out of their hands, and so out of their timing cycles, and at a lot lower technical level.
Their integration can be at the purely passive bidirectional-link level for information coupling, but a low technical coupling, making for low direct operational interaction. That allows both to operate fairly independently, allowing each their own operational timing schedules, which may suit each team much better.