HTML, XHTML & CSS

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Part I: Getting to Know (X)HTML and CSS
Planning Your Site
One important first step in creating an effective site UI has nothing to do with
markup, but everything to do with planning. Before your site grows too large
(or before you build your site if you haven’t yet started), scope out your
site’s exact purpose and goals. When you know your site’s scope and goals,
you can create a better interface to embody them.
Before designing your site, ask yourself these questions:
✓ Why are you creating this site?
✓ What do you want to convey to users?
✓ Who is your target audience? For example:
• What’s the average age of your users?
• How well does your audience work with the Internet?
✓ How many pages do you need in your site?
✓ What kind of hierarchy will you use to organize your pages? For example:
• Will users go through your site linearly?
• Will users jump from topic to topic?
After you answer these questions, you can better understand your site’s
goals and needs. For example, an online store might have these goals:
✓ Let visitors browse an online catalog and put items in a shopping cart.
✓ Provide visitors a way to purchase the items in their cart.
✓ Help users make smart purchasing decisions.
✓ Ease merchandise returns and exchanges.
✓ Solicit feedback from users about products they want to see in the catalog
or ways to make the site better.
✓ Enable users to comment on and rate products.
Stating clear goals helps you get a better sense of what you must do on your
Web site to fulfill these goals. To do the things an online store does, for example,
your site is going to need the following:
✓ An online catalog, complete with shopping cart
✓ Buying guides or other information that can help users make better purchasing
decisions