Why a website?

What are you trying to achieve in becoming a website owner? This is a question that most people don’t ask, consequently few websites have any tangible goals. If you can’t answer this question, it’s probably time to quit.

Who are your target audience?

Should you decide to go ahead, there’s nothing wrong with catching the eye of casual surfers, but it makes sense to have an idea of the type of visitor you’d like to attract.

This’ll help you decide what information needs to form the core of the website, remember, content is king.

What do you expect them to do?

There’s been quite a lot written recently on the ‘Call to Action’.

Your goals, remember the first step, will tell you what action you’d like visitors to take, but you need to decide how to structure the site to take them in the right direction.

What’s their motivation for investigating your website?

There are a huge number of websites on the Internet, and some of them will offer the same thing as you’re site, so what’s going to differentiate your website from these others?

Knowing your audience helps when creating an effective marketing campaign to accompany the site launch: where to advertise and how.

Why will they come back?

Your content is undoubtedly fabulous, and a sound foundation, but how is it structured and presented? If your hard won readership can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll go somewhere else, and are unlikely to come back.

You’ve got to commit to regularly providing something new and of value to your visitors. This is seriously time consuming, and if you’re unwilling, or unable to make this commitment it’s your last chance to back out of the website game.

Still interested? Next time it’s time to start building the website.

How much of the project to attempt to tackle? Sticking to the Agile principles of releasing little and often, I decided that jumping in with a full blogging or CMS would be a mistake. Limiting things to HTML and CSS, with the portfolio displays enhanced with Lightbox, provides more control over the design.

This is especially important when starting out, and I’m not expecting the design to remain static. Once established, adding more functionality, or moving to a WordPress theme will be a much easier task. I feel that the website is the simplest thing that could work.

• The title of the post.
• The name of the author.
• The date on which the post was published.
• An excerpt from the content.
• The post body itself.
• The tags associated with the post.
• The categories into which the post has been placed.

I’m sure that there are more, but this is as far as I got… so the big question is how do I mark this lot up in order to extract even more meaning?

The two text fields, both being content; the excerpt and post body; don’t necessarily need any container since they’re build from paragraphs. However using <div> would give me a lot more control over the CSS, but is this adding unnecessary mark-up?

I thought about creating an unordered list out of the post metadata; author, date, tags and categories. It’s all very well describing the whole lot using the ‘metadata’ label, but that’s not very helpful because they don’t belong together.

I figure that the tags and categories are easy since they’re obviously lists, and unordered ones at that. But the title, author and date are a different matter. Including them to a list is definitely adding extra mark—up, so I haven’t.

This is definitely an ongoing problem.