Web Site Development Building large web sites is similar to other large construction projects – Software development – Database development – Manufacturing What all of these have in common are that they (potentially) involve many people in the process and include multiple steps from original inception through the launch of the resulting artifact(s) Initiating each process is some form of design specification – At each step of the process, the specification should be used as a point of comparison to make sure the project is on the right track – Further, having a good design will aid the development at every step

Personnel for Web Development Many of these roles exist in other forms of project development including software engineering – Project manager – oversees development process, coordinates team activities, creates the project plan and schedule, accountable for reaching project milestones – Information architect – defines site organization, navigation, labeling from specifications, this role may be assumed by the project manager or the web developers – Marketing representatives – marketing plans and goals, work to create a web presence, or a look and feel that aligns with marketing goals of the organization – Copyright and editor – prepares the text, takes materials from previous publications (brochures, newsletters, etc), proofs the web site for grammar and consistency

Continued Personnel continued – Content manager – participates in the strategic and creative development, changes to, and enhancements/improvements of the web site – Graphic designer – determines appropriate use of color, images, creates page layouts and designs graphics – Database administrator – needed if the web site is to interact with a database, creates and maintains the database and (possibly) provides server side scripting for the web page to interact with the database – Network administrator – configures and maintains the web server including any necessary network security – Web developer – those responsibility for writing the html and css code and client side scripting, may also develop server side scripting as is necessary

Skill Sets Management – knowing how to coordinate your people’s skills, foster communication, plan, schedule Analysis – be able to define specifications, foresee problems, compare needs to resources, probably will be used with the design step Design – at two levels, the organization of the web site and the layout of the individual pages Programming – coding (both html and scripting languages), debugging System administration – possibly not involved at all or only near the end of the process, may be a person outside of the organization

The Development Process As with other projects, the development process is one of a lifecycle and the roots of web development are in the system development life cycle The SDLC consists of a feasibility study (systems integration), requirements (analysis), design, implementation and maintenance Here, these become conceptualization, requirements, design, production/testing/launch, maintenance and evaluation

Comments Conceptualization – Determine long-term and short-term goals, or mission – including how you will evaluate success or failure Analysis – Create a hierarchy of topics to be made available on the web site – this in term dictates the organization of the web site – Determine functional requirements, e.g., will forms be used to collect data? Will data collection involve real- time access to a database? Will data need to be verified? – Determine resource requirements – Determine content requirements – where will the content come from? – Possibly review competitor sites for ideas – Estimate costs and do a cost/benefit analysis

Continued Design – Select an organization (probably hierarchical, maybe linear, maybe some hybrid version) – Create a prototype design – wireframe of the page layouts – Create a specific overall look and feel to the website (a common page layout) – Document each page – what will each page store? What graphic elements (and other multimedia) will go on this page? What links will this page have? Any special information needs? Production – Choose a web authoring tool – Organize site files – Develop and test components Testing – Test on different browsers, different browser versions, different screen resolutions, different bandwidths, multiple locations

And Finally Launch the web site – Make the pages publically available – Perform whatever form(s) of marketing and promotion are needed so that people know the site is available Maintenance – Accumulate errors as found by employees and users and correct either when found or in pre-specified time units (e.g., weekly) – Perform upgrades to newer versions of available technologies, modify content for recency Evaluation – Compare the original goals of the web site to the current results, did you meet your goals? – If so, look to improve the web site – If not, why not? Go back to the specifications and design and see if there is some flaw, work to fix these discrepancies

Other Methodologies While the SDLC is a traditional form of system development of which the web site development cycle is based, there are other approaches to web site development – Prototyping Create a small model and see how it works, correct it and enlarge/revise it, repeat until the full web site is complete – Spiral development Small portions of the project are completed at a time and added upon completion – Agile software development Quick coding rather than documentation, go through many iterative steps, improving at each step, but do each step in a minimal amount of time

Testing Sheet

Domain Name Overview It might seem like a no-brainer, but what domain name do you want? – If your business has an already known name, use it – Otherwise the name should describe your business instead of having some buzz word or fun name (e.g., bing.com) be brief (if possible) and avoid hyphens select the proper extension, don’t use.com if you are a non-profit organization (.org) or others such as.biz,.us,.net brainstorm on potential keywords avoid trademarked and patented words/phrases research your potential name to see how it might be used on the net already (e.g., don’t pick something that people use as a derogatory term) verify the availability of the name you select, many domain names are already spoken for or reserved Once you’ve selected, register it! – A.com name can cost $35 a year

Web Hosting Small to medium size web site – Suggested requirements include Unlimited data transfer 60MB+ hard disk space, Server side scripting support – Typically the ISP that hosts such a site has many other sites on the same server Large to enterprise size web site – Here, you will probably want a dedicated web server – whether for rent or in-house A co-located server is one that your company has purchased and configured but is stored at your web host provider’s location for security and maintenance purposes – in effect, they do the administration on the hardware and software and you are in charge of the web site itself A virtual host is a web server that hosts many didn’t web sites if you use this, it usually means that you will have a decent amount of disk space but the server will be spending time servicing requests from multiple sites