Lesson 4

To review, our 6-stage Web design process looks like this:

1. Define the Project
2. Develop Site Structure & Organize Information
3. Develop Page Structure & Organize Interactions
4. Design Graphic User Interface
5. Build Web Site
6. Produce & Publish Web Site

This lesson focuses on Stage 3, Develop Page Structure & Organize Interactions.

In the previous lesson, we talked about how the content of a Web site is organized into individual Web pages listed under topics all linked together by information structure. Your site may consist of information structures that are hierarchical, linear, or web-like. Now it's time to look at the organization of the individual pages, and how users interact with common features of those pages (for instance, navigation systems). Here are the steps of Stage 3 broken down:

3. Develop Page Structure & Organize Interactions
   1. Identify site structure themes and areas
   2. Identify and catalogue page types
   3. Create a predictable navigation system that reaches to all site levels
   4. Map Web page types into wire frames
   5. Compose valid XHTML templates for page types
   6. Compose rough CSS to match wire frames
   7. Initial internal usability testing
   8. Modify Web site structure as needed

This lesson deals only with the first 4 steps of this stage; we won't be getting into the last 4 steps of this stage until later in the course (Lesson 7 and beyond).