Planning Multiple Web Pages

Good planning is the most critical element to successful web page design. When planning, particularly for multiple web pages, i.e. for a department or business, consider the following process.

  1. Perform a needs analysis on who and why people would use the information you want to publish on the web.

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  2. Prioritize and outline all information you wish to include on web pages, organizing by categories and sub-categories.

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  3. The amount of information in each category and/or sub-category helps determine how many individual pages need to be designed. 

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  4. If you have a lot of information, main categories can translate into directories and sub-categories can become sub-directories if necessary.

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  5. Organize your pages in a manner that best suits how users would seek the information presented on the pages.

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  6. Diagram or create a storyboard that helps you visualize your page organization, using the Home Page as the hub page from which other pages branch. 

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  7. Be consistant with your web page design on all your web pages.  Pages should have a consistant design. 

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  8. Go back to #1 after completing this process to determine if there are modifications to be made to the organization of your pages. 

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  9. Use relative pathnames for linking all your local HTML files

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  10. The final step is to test web pages to make certain they can be viewed by your audience in a variety of graphic and text (if necessary) browsers. All browsers do not view HTML files the same. Go to the Test Pages links 
Last Modified: 10/19/98