Exclusive Extract from Dreamweaver MX 2004 Design Projects, Rachel Andrew, Craig Grannell, Allan Kent and Christopher Schmitt, friends of Ed, ISBN 1-59059-409-6, 2004, by kind permission of friends of Ed.

Extract taken from Chapter 2: News Portal by Allan Kent

Information architecture

The first step in any web project should always be the creation of the site's Information Architecture. The Information Architecture for a site encompasses setting out the goals for our website, creating mock-ups of the web pages themselves, and everything else in between. It may seem like a lot of unnecessary work to do, but by hammering out the details of the project right up front, you make sure that there is no miscommunication about the nature and functionality of the website and end up saving yourself time in the long run.

Not only does this present a professional and efficient face to your client, but by setting out the architecture of the site before you begin coding it, you will find that you code with far more direction and spend less time reworking or redesigning sections of code. It's all down in black and white in the IA document.

The first thing we will want to do is define our goals for the site.

Goals

Many sites exist simply because everyone else has one. This is not a good reason for putting up a website. By setting out our goals, we get down to the real reasons for creating this site, and once we know that, we will be better able to plan the rest of it.

In our case we are building a news portal. What are our reasons for building a news portal?

• Are we a traditional news agency (TV or newspaper) and have a vested interest in reporting news?
• Do we have a specific niche interest that we are providing news for?
• Are we simply providing news as a service that draws browsers to the site and we will then generate revenue from advertising on the site?
• Or do we want to take on the CNNs and BBCs of the world?

For the purpose of this chapter, we'll presume that our client is a national television station and they wish to extend their news programming to include up-to-the-minute news on their website. They do not wish to compete with CNN and report on every newsworthy item out there, but to report on local issues and ones that are important in the international arena. Their goal in this case is to not only add value to their station by providing an extra service, but also attract more viewers to their station.

Now that we have the goals firmly in our mind, we can begin looking at some background material that will help us in deciding what the functionality of our site will be.

Background

In this section we will want to put together some relevant background information that we can use a basis for deciding on the content and functionality of our site. Areas that we will address here are the kinds of users we will be attracting to our site, what they will expect from the site, and investigating potential competitors.

Audience

Invariably, the kind of site that you design will determine the kind of audience that you will attract. For this reason, you should decide up front the kind of person that you will want to attract to your site. Of course, you should design and plan your site for not only the kind of person that you wish to attract, but also the kind of person that will browse your site irrespective of your plans for whether they are the intended audience or not. Sure, if you are planning a site that provides news on the latest goings on in the hip hop music scene, you will want to attract fans of hip hop music.

But that is not the only type of person who might browse your site. You may also find that music journalists read your site on the off-chance that you have scooped some news that they haven't. Executives from record labels may come to the site to see how the public is receiving their latest offering. When you're defining the goals for your site, you will have your intended audience clearly in mind, but you should not forget about your incidental audience as well.

So, let's now take a look at the audience from our perspective. Since we are working with a local news station, we do know that the majority of the viewers of the site will be people local to the area, interested in finding out about the local news. We didn't really define any goal that would single out a specific target audience, so we're looking at a more general audience here. In some ways, designing a site for a general audience may be a bit trickier, especially from a design point of view. For our hip hop site targeting a younger audience, we would have little debate on how we wanted our site to look, but in the case of general news, we have to be more careful.

Since we're extending our normal news service, we will find that the news that is reported on cannot be lumped into any specific category. We'll have top international stories, local content, financial news, sports, and weather. The local and international news content can further be broken down into categories such as politics, technology, science, nature, and the arts.

Our audience will be quite varied in terms of whom they are and what they will want to get out of the site. Our site therefore will have to be more functional in catering to a variety of possible interests, rather than having a specific look and feel to attract a specific kind of person.

A news company should already have demographics on the people that watch their news on the TV, but by moving onto the Internet, they are opening themselves up to a vast new audience.

To better understand the kinds of people that you will have coming to your site, it helps to construct scenarios for them. To do this, you need to imagine the type of people that will come to your site—this is sometimes called creating "personas." Then imagine why that person would come to the site, what they would want to see, and how they would try finding that information. By doing this you get a very good idea of how to eventually structure the site, and the kinds of things that you should include.

Let's look at a few scenarios:

Scenario 1: The executive

This is an easy one. An executive sitting at their desk with nothing better to do decides to catch up on the news. In this case the person will have a fairly short attention span and will not want to have to wade through masses of information. But since they are looking for something to do with their time, if they see something that interests them, they will want to see more. This person will typically click at random, following links off the page until they find something that attracts their interest.

Scenario 2: Sports fan

Again, not too difficult to conceptualize. A sports fan logs on to the site in the morning and wants to see the latest sports scores and reports. This person will hit the front page of the site and immediately want to browse to the area of the site that interests them.

Scenario 3: Interested reader

By interested reader we mean someone who has a particular interest in a specific story for some reason or another. This person may be really interested in the Miss World beauty pageant, and will navigate to any story on the site that is related to this.

You could carry on like this forever, but as long as you have a few scenarios that cover the spectrum of your audience, you will be fine. Even if the entire spectrum of possible readers are not covered, by building personas you will be able to identify and relate to 80% of your audience. Already from just these three your mind may be ticking over with features and functionality that would attract each of these types of people back to our site. We'll start looking at these features in the next section when we deal with features and content. Before we get there though, we need to complete our background work and take a look at what our competitors are offering.

The competition

When planning a site it's always a good thing to know what your (or your clients') competition is doing. By evaluating both what features the competition has as well as how successfully they implement them, you can plan your site to either fill a gap that they have left in the market or simply provide a superior service to the one that they have.

While features are a great thing to have on the site, also evaluate how successful they have been in presenting the information—is it laid out clearly, can you easily find your way around the site, and what sort of load times did you experience?

There are three sites that we will take a look at: the BBC News site, http://news.bbc.co.uk; CNN, www.cnn.com; and Independent Newspapers Online (IOL), www.iol.co.za.