It is interesting to note that when defining what makes a site good three of the four factors listed referred to content. A site with poor content is a fairly pointless thing and so the first task when planning a site is choosing and planning the presentation of your content.

Deciding on Your Content

You may think you know what your content will comprise but standing back and taking a logical and critical look at it before you begin will pay dividends.

Listing every category of content you plan to include is a useful exercise. This will roughly correspond to the pages and sections you plan for your site. Keep it general at first, you can refine it and think about sub-categories later. In these articles we use as an example a school site, but the same general principles apply no matter what the subject of the site. A possible content list for a school site might comprise:

1. Home page
2. Information about the school
3. Contact information
4. News and events 
5. Information about the local area
6. Some displays or presentation of pupil work
7. Internal Resources: eg teachers notes for reference by pupils
8. Links

Who is the site for?

Try to list as many categories of people as you imagine might need, or find, your site and decide how, or if, you are going to satisfy each one’s need for information. Be very general and try to include as many types of user as you can think of at first – you can group these people into a smaller number of categories later.

Taking a school site as an example the following could be some of the users you come up with. Note that there will always be some overlap between the various groups.

1. Pupils of the school
2. Pupils of other schools
3. Parents of current pupils
4. Parents of potential future pupils
5. Teachers in the school
6. Teachers elsewhere
7. Other people in the locality
8. Past pupils
9. People originally from the area, or whose ancestors are originally from the area, but who now live elsewhere, possibly abroad
10. People considering moving to the area
11. People with an interest in the topics of any pupils’ articles/projects etc included in the site
12. People with a general interest in education
13. Inexperienced Internet users
14. Experienced Internet users

These categories might be refined into 4 major categories of user and an attempt made to decide what content would interest each:

1. Pupils, parents and teachers directly involved with the school
2. Others interested in the school (prospective parents, teachers in other schools, those interested in education generally)
3. People interested in the locality
4. People interested in the specific content of articles/projects

Bear in mind that within each of these categories there will be both experienced and inexperienced Internet users.

In each case ask yourself the following questions:

• Do you have content relevant to these users?
• Will they be able to understand it as it currently exists?
• Do you want to cater for these users at all?
• Is there content that is, honestly, of no great interest to anyone?
• Is there content you had not planned but might now aim to include at a later date?

Now you can create a detailed list of exactly what you will include for each user. Make two lists for each – content you have now and will include form the outset and content that you plan to include at a later date. For example you might have relatively little information on the local area available but you could include a small amount with links to other sites at the beginning and plan to have transition year pupils create more over the next year or two.

Now that you have made some decisions on what your site will contain it is time to think about how you will organize it all.

Part II >>