Or perhaps you are put in charge of leading a team to design/build a website. Or are you simply looking for someone else to build a website for you? Either way it behooves you to establish a fundamental knowledge on the processes and strategy behind the creation and maintenance of a website (regardless of it’s size and scope).
Lucky for you there is an abundance of information on the web to help educate yourself on the matter. One such resource is “The Web Style Guide” (3rd Edition) which has an online version that covers a myriad of web design related topics. Recently a friend sent me a link to a section of the online guide discussing The Site Development Process.
As a Web Design student, who is relatively green on the subject, I found it to be very informative and it made me think about how my role in the development process affects others. It also got me thinking about how a web designer should keep the client’s best interests in mind when developing a site.
How you (the creator) chooses to code and structure the site will greatly impact the amount of downstream work it takes to maintain it. For instance, taking shortcuts in the design, not properly validating code, etc. might save you time in the short term but it could end up causing untold hours and money on re-work to fix and maintain later. Not to mention that it could damage your rep as a designer and cause a loss of business in the future.
So be sure to stop and carefully consider the whole picture before you rush into developing your next site. Whether you be the client, designer or webmaster, it benefits you and everyone else around you to plan for the long haul because no one enjoys stumbling upon a broken website that time and society long forgot.
http://www.limpfish.com/
A well written post that is very informative. I like that you talk about not taking shortcuts in the design process. I agree that not validating code is an easy shortcut to make but in the long run will hurt your site. It is an important step in the process. Your post has very good advice for new designers about looking at the whole picture.