Category: Basics
There are always some very basic choices to be made when undertaking a project.
- 1Picking the philosophy
- The philosophy behind a product is critical, as it contains the criteria by which all decisions about the product are made.
- 2Audience
- 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.
- 3Technologies
- One of the earliest decisions to make is what technologies to use, as that is dependent upon not only availability and skillset, but also what must be used.
- 4Tools
- Having established the technologies, next is what tools to develop them with.
- 5Data structure
- 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.
- 6Program structure
- The program structure is what shapes how the code is constructed and the data is used.
- 7Implementation order
- There are many ways to develop a product, with what works best dependent upon skills.
- 8Privacy
- While most sites want as much information from site visitors as possible, Smallsite Design focuses on the opposite.
- 9Minified
- Minifying is the reducing of unnecessary information to minimise transmission and browser-processing times.
- 10Facilities
- While a product has some core functionality, there are many facilities that it can also provide.
- 11Editing
- Most editors are basically text editors with some facility to format. However, treating a page as just a mass of text makes editing unstable.
- 12Neurodiversity
- 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.
- 13User interface
- There are several decisions to be made when designing the user interface (UI).
- 14Use the software
- Usually software is made by developers that do not use the software itself for its intended purpose.
- 15Statistics
- Statistics play a role in helping to understand how visitors use a site, but they need to be useful for that role.
- 16Selling
- 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.
- 17Licensing
- One of the major design criteria was to minimise how much private information was gathered, and this extended to licensing.
- 18The home straight
- There comes a point in a project where it dawns that the end is close, but the activity seems to ramp up.