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Four Things to Consider During the Web Redesign Process
Sep 2004If your organization plans to redesign a web site, it might decide to contract a web design firm to create the look and feel of the site. If you do, be sure to ask the designer to deliver the four key items below - and make sure you ask before signing a contract.
1. Working mockups
Too many designers still deliver mockups of web sites as JPEG images that were created in Photoshop or another art program. This is almost always a bad idea. If you're asking someone to design the look and feel of your web site, an image of the page can only deliver the "look" - the "feel" is completely missing.
If the mockups are delivered as actual HTML documents, you can view the design in the web browser where it belongs. With a working mockup, you can see what happens when you position your mouse over a link; you can view the design at different resolutions, on several different machines and using different font sizes; you can view the design in several different browsers to see if it works as well in Firefox as it does in Internet Explorer. In other words, you can test the design in the real world early in the process, when fixing design problems is much easier.
Requiring working mockups also puts on the onus on the designer to make sure their design is "doable" on the web. We've seen more than one occasion where a design was signed off based on a Photoshop image, only to find that creating a web page that conformed to the design was nearly impossible without resorting to error-prone HTML hacks.
2. Standards-compliant code
If you are doing a significant redesign of your web site in 2004 or beyond, it is worth investing in a design that makes use of the basic standards of the web, including XHTML and cascading style sheets (CSS). There are several valid reasons to adopt web standards for your site, including:
- Development of a web site is generally much faster.
- Maintenance of code is generally greatly simplified.
- Standards-compliant sites tend to require smaller files per page, so over time you can realize non-trivial savings in bandwidth costs.
In the past, support for web standards was lacking in some of the major browsers on the market, but at this point most of the worst browsers (like Netscape 4.x) have all but died off. A well-designed, standards-compliant web site should work wonderfully in the vast majority of browsers and should degrade gracefully in the non-standards-compliant browsers left on the market.
In general, re-building a web site based on web standards is a worthwhile investment that will continue to prove its value over time. Re-building a site without good use of standards, on the other hand, would be short-sighted and could prove costly.
3. Template-friendly designs
If a content management system (CMS) is going to feed your web site, be sure that the code produced by the design company can easily be turned into templates. This is important because you'll need to build templates that your CMS will use to generate the pages on your site. If the design is too convoluted to be easily broken into templates, or if the pages only look right when the code structure is hand-tweaked to make the content fit, the design won't integrate well with your templating system.
Ideally, your designer should be able to provide you with "skeleton" designs that you can then fill in with content samples to see how the design handles variance. One common problem is a design that falls apart if the content varies significantly in length. For example, some designs break when a headline is too long, or if the main body of the page is too short (say, a news article that only contains one paragraph).
4. Documentation
A web design should be documented enough so you can extend it into new areas of your site as they arise. The HTML should be well-commented and easy to understand. If the site uses CSS, the class names and style definitions should be understandable and preferably documented in some form other than the CSS file itself, such as a Word document or spreadsheet that can be referenced without having to open the CSS code in a text editor.
If the code that generates the web site can't be easily understood, as the site grows and modifications become necessary, you run a greater risk of introducing inconsistencies in how designs are implemented and how design elements are used.
Ideally, the designer should be able to offer a style guide that can be used to describe how different elements should be used and how design elements fit together in the overall scheme. For example, if your site has more than one way to present lists of links to other stories, a good style guide would describe when the use of each one was appropriate. Perhaps one style should be used on a list of archived stories while another style should be used when listing a set of stories related to the current story. Without a clear set of cases for using each different design element, styles might have a tendency to be used in unintended ways that can break down the visual continuity of your site's design.
Graphic images should also be adequately documented. For example, if your site makes use of graphics for navigational elements such as buttons, it is important that you know the font characteristics and the color palette used to create the graphics. (Ideally, you would also receive the original graphic files themselves.) Otherwise, you'll be forced to either guess, which will lead to inconsistency, or rely on the designer to create new graphics for you, which will result in lost time and needless cost in the future.
