Your Online Presence > Strategy & Development

Getting a Website - Introduction

By Lasa Information Systems Team

Many voluntary sector organisations are thinking of getting a website. Many more have one already, and are thinking of improving it. This document describes the steps you should go through when planning a site.

Only a small part of the work is concerned with the technicalities of how you actually produce pages. This is because designing a web site isn’t primarily about computer software – any more, for example, than writing a successful book is about being able to use a word processor.

Instead, you need to begin by clarifying why you want a website in the first place, and what contribution the site will make to the overall aims of your organisation. This makes it easier to make the right decisions about what content the site will have and how it will be structured. Only after making these decisions should you begin to think about technicalities:

• What software can you use to create pages?
• Should you get a professional to develop the site for you?
• What sort of appearance should your site have?

Although the web has only existed for a few years, developers have gained a lot of experience about presenting information in this new medium. Spend some time looking at the most successful sites – such as Yahoo!, BBC News or Microsoft. Look at a variety of sites – commercial and voluntary sector, large and small. Think about what works and what doesn’t.  What would make you use a site again? What do you find irritating or off-putting? If you see something you like, considering imitating it on your own site. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

We have divided the rest of this document into nine parts. You can read these as individual articles, or you can read through all of them as one long document.

• Why Do You Want a Website?
• Developing Your Strategy
• Planning Your Content
• Do It Yourself or Get a Website Developer?
• Organising the Information on Your Site
• Choosing Design Software
• Planning the Visual Style of Your Pages
• Stylesheets
• Test Everything
• Updating and Developing Your Site