How to Magnificently Build a Catastrophic Website

How to magnificently build a catastrophic website With businesses building websites since the 90s you'd think that best practices are well followed by now. Don't be so sure! Let's revisit some of the necessary (and obvious) steps, and compare them to what often happens in real life, with catastrophic results. 1. CONCEPT Research is vital. Does the idea meet a market or business opportunity? Ensure you align your website to an objective or strategy. TOYS Rnt US "The CEO was shopping online for his son's toy and thought it was 'really cool 2. DESIGN Home About us Contact s Buy iTravel JUST BOOK IT. revolutionary Create mood boards to help develop design concepts. The new site needs to reflect your unique brand personality. "Let's do ours like the Apple website, they're so cool! And on our homepage let's do that thing that Nike does. And hey, what about Amazon? OK, forget Amazon...' 3. DEFINE SUCCESS MEASURES The adage 'You can't manage what you can't measure' certainly holds true on the web and you need to think about what YOU ARE THEHTML TO MY CSS your 'Return On Investment' will be. "I reckon we'll get loads of 'likes' if we do this. Plus Colin in IT said it will be built using Jelly Bean Sandwich 5.5 technology because we definitely want that." Jellybean Sandwich DUMMIES 4. INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE 70plew.o tr The structure of your website's information needs to be logical and fit your audience's needs. Create 'user journeys' to structure the navigation. Sovishy Pants Tievel Hotels Welcome to our Travel site "Bob our boss likes photos of himself, so we need to have one on the homepage with his welcome message... And maybe a slideshow of cats doing funny stuff? People love cats!" 5. USER TESTING Remember that you are building the website for your users, not for yourself; so it makes sense to test some key features with them, and to do it before launch to flag any problems. "Rory the programmer likes it that way and said that if people don't get it, then we don't want them as our customers." Warning WARNING! This is a keyboard only website and your mouse has been disabled. If you are not an advanced user please leave now as only keyboard shortcuts will be accepted. Yes No More Info 6. DETAILED DESIGN It is crucial to document how everything functions on your website. This will prevent broken links and missing information, and will ultimately ensure you don't launch an incomplete site. BBE Travel Headlines Itempus tellus tristique ut. eliquam nun Health Business Sport Booo0000orrrrringgggg! Tell the designers to go look at the BBC site and do it like that! Entertainment 7. USER ACCEPTANCE TESTING Once your website is finished and before it's launched you should test it according to what was specified. This is best done by following test scripts, which should account for all possible eventualities of the site. "Click, click, click - looks fine! Make it go live, happy hour at the Club House starts in 10 minutes! 8. LAUNCH! 79.5% of all business websites implode within 14 days of launch. We're not certain about this figure - it's only our rough guess and not based on any proper research (just like how some websites are built). destination www.mydestination.com Sources Our personal experiences from various places of previous employment, hearsay, and wild rumours that have alarming petrol-like whiffs of truth. Disclaimer Names of people have been changed to safeguard their privacy (and employability), but also to prevent them from becoming Z-list Internet celebrities.