Requirements gathering

Techno-babble
This is the requirements gathering page. It contains sections of: what is the website for, what should your website look like, etc..
It's either going to be constructed with a pageview view that will show the page and then sections as an attachment view. And the sections themselves will be constructed as further views.
Or it will be a page with a series of panels for each section and each panel will contain a section view listing the subsections and then showing the sub-section content as a preview when hovered over, opening up to the actual sub-section content when clicke on. This will be an improvement on the static site which did this using CSS and dynamically positioned spans.

Here are just a few examples to get you thinking

Advertising
Marketing
Publicity
Customer awareness
Brochure
Portfolio - Samples of your work
Advice and guidance
Sharing information");
Social purposes
Product catalogue
Online shop (e-Commerce)
Publishing
Providing an online service
Events
Charitable purposes
Newsletters
Fan club

We could go on forever.

The primary purpose of the Bobbing Wide website is to make you choose us for your website design and website development.
How we attempt to do this is a combination of quite a few of the above.

products or services you plan to offer online

Do you have products to sell or do you provide services or a combination of the both?
The services that Bobbing Wide provide are:

website design - we will design you a brand new website
website development - we will develop your brand new website or we will upgrade your existing site
website support - and we will continue to support your website

goals of your website

What is your goal for launching an online presence for your business?

Is it something measurable? Examples:

Increase your customer base by x percent
Increase your turnover by selling to online customers
Increase your cash flow by selling off excess stock
"Reduce your workload
Reduce the number of late night emergency calls

The goals of Bobbing Wide are:

improve our work life balance
to truly enjoy our work
to make lots of lovely, working websites
to do the techno-babble, so you don't have to

what sets you apart

What will set you apart from your competition?

What do you do better than your competitors? Why are your products superior?
Why should people want you?
What is your USP (Unique Selling Point)? What are your PCR's (Points of Compelling Relevance)?

If you already have a reputation for quality, service, product range, price, or after care then you've got a big advantage over a startup company.

If not then we'll need to discover the hook lines that best describe you.
Then you have to find a way to get your customers to believe you.

your target audience

Who will be your primary target market and who will be your secondary target market?
Bobbing Wide's primary target market are small businesses who either want a new website or want improvements to their existing one.
Our secondary market are people who want to know more about how their website works.
i.e. those who want to know a bit more of the techno-babble.

Knowing this helps us to decide what you should have in your website's content and how you should present this information.

What should your website look like?

Information we need to plan the web design and web development includes:

estimated website size

words on each page

pictures

colour including icons and graphics

text style

layout

navigation

estimated website size

A simple way to determine the size and therefore the complexity of your website is to count the number of pages it will contain. By page I mean a separately choosable website page such as:

home - the first page of your website
product main page - the main page for your products, if not on the home page
services main page - the main page for your services, if not on the home page
about - a page that says something about your company
contact form - an online form enabling customers to write to you online
any number of product or services sub pages
FAQ - frequently asked questions and their answers

words on each page

The words on your website are known as the copy.
These have to perfectly and succinctly get your message across with the minimum of fuss.
As you can see from this attempt, some copy is better than others.
Good pictures are also essential.

pictures

A picture can be worth a thousand words, but only if it is put in the correct context.

Photos or images are used to make your website more pleasing to the eye.

Their size, position and colour are as important as the message they convey.

You may already have photos and images that you want to use on your site. Or you may want to choose images from an enormous collection of stock photos.
... searching on http://www.istockphoto.com for 'bobbing' will give you over 12 thousand results
... but this picture is not one of those listed.

colour including icons and graphics

You can choose from the full spectrum of colours for your website. Using a limited set of colours from a particular scheme works best. There are tools and rules to help you choose.

The colour scheme for this website was chosen by a colour schemer tool working from a base colour of
#e2b735

See http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html

Colours are used for foreground text, background colours, background images and icons

text style

Text can be styled in a variety of ways:

font decides the shape of the characters
size suggests how large or small it should appear
weight indicates degrees of boldness or lightness
text can be italicized or normal
and many other transformations

Normally heading information is larger than paragraphs under the headings

Then you have the whitespace between different blocks of text: margins, padding, linesize, etc

When all these are put together you have definied your website's typography.

layout

The overall look and feel of your website is given by your page layout

The standard areas of a page are:

header - where you might have your logo
navigation menus
body
sidebars
footer

Page layouts can be:

Fixed (aka grid) - they don't change much when the window is sized.
Floating - allowing areas of text to reflow when the window is sized
Hybrid - containg a mixture of fixed and floating

Pages may appear in multiple columns: 1, 2, 3, etc

The Bobbing Wide website has a multi-column fixed format

navigation

To get from one part of your website to another we provide navigational links.

These may be styled to appear as menus, buttons or textual links.

You can choose how you present the choices to your customers:

horizontal menu below the header
simpler version of the menu in the footer
dynamic menus which show more options as you hover over them
vertical lists acting as menus
call to action buttons or links

Links can also control how information is ordered on a page

You can choose to make the navigation simple or complex

For a very small website you may only need a horizontal menu below the header.

Basic company information

The sort of stuff you supplied to Yellow Pages.

company name

company logo

type of business

company name

For example: Bobbing Wide is the name of our company

company logo

Your company may be recognised by your company logo.

If you don't have one already then you will want to think about getting one

The current logo for Bobbing Wide is

Bobbing Wide

Not the best in the world... but we're working on it.

type of business

What type of business are you?

accountant, architect, B&B, butcher, baker, candlestick maker, caterer, chemist, dentist, designer, estate agent, faith healer, farrier, florist, garage mechanic, horticulturalist, insurance broker, jeweller, karate teacher, limousine hire, mousetrap inventor, nursery, occupational psychologist, orthodontist, photographer, podiatrist, poet, quidditch equipment supplier, restaurateur, retailer, sailmaker, spiritualist, surveyor, tennis coach, therapist, translator, undertaker, upholsterer, veterinarian, wedding planner, xylophonist, yacht broker, zoologist, ...

I'm sure there are many many more

Anything else you can think of?

then what?

Putting all your requirements together helps us to determine which level of website you might need and how much it might cost.

Email: herb@bobbingwide.com work02392 410090 cell07876 236864

Bobbing Wideweb design - web development