Category: Basics

There are always some very basic choices to be made when undertaking a project.

1.Picking the philosophy 5w: The philosophy behind a product is critical, as it contains the criteria by which all decisions about the product are made.
2.Audience 13w: Picking the target audience sets the scope of the product, as it really defines what needs to be included, and excluded, when deciding upon what functionality to provide.
3.Tools 2w: One of the earliest decisions to make is what tools to use, as that is dependent upon not only availability and skillset, but also what must be used.
4.Data structure 11w: Web sites consist of pages and media, like images. How and where they are stored, and how they are accessed, is critical to smooth site operation.
5.Privacy 11w: While most sites want as much information from site visitors as possible, Smallsite Design focuses on the opposite.
6.Minified 5w: Minifying is the reducing of unnecessary content to minimise transmission and browser-processing times.
7.Facilities 5w: While a product has some core functionality, there are many facilities that it can also provide.
8.Editing 11w: Most editors are basically text editors with some facility to format. However, treating a page as just a mass of text makes editing unstable.
9.Neurodiversity 12w: Many products are designed for the majority, assuming that everyone else can adapt to the extent that their abilities allow. However, those with a different neurology often cannot adapt.
10.User interface 2w: There are several decisions to be made when designing the user interface (UI).
11.Statistics 2w: Statistics play a role in helping to understand how visitors use a site, but they need to be useful for that role.
12.Selling 5w: When it comes to selling, most will want to go for the cheapest, but there are tradeoffs with that that can bring a lot of later headaches.
13.Licensing 2w: One of the major design criteria was to minimise how much private information was gathered, and this extended to licensing.