0. A Web Development Methodology.

This coursebook is organised around a methodology for developing Web sites. The phases of this methodology are:

1. Organisational Strategy
2. Pre-Project Planning
3. Design
4. Prototyping
5. Implementation
6. Launch and Maintenance

This methodology is used to structure lecture, tutorial and assignment work. The written work of your assignment will use the principal headings from the notes below. Ensure that you follow this methodology in your development work, and write up your documentation accordingly. Your grade will partially reflect your ability to follow these instructions.

What is a methodology?

A methodology is an ordered set of steps which constitutes a way of approaching a complex problem. The steps of this methodology form a structured whole which integrates:

• Principles - fundamental ideals and beliefs used to guide decision making and achieve a pervasive or overall result. Example: user-based testing is a means of ensuring that a web-site will be generally comprehensible to those who need to use it.
• Guidelines - recommended courses of action that are in support of a set of principles and specific to a particular domain such as the Web. Example: construct a consistent navigation system for your web site.
• Conventions - specific, agreed-to, prescriptive design practices, typically in support of a set of guidelines and principles. Example: construct a family of style sheets for an organisational site and use them for each page.

A methodology can never be completely prescriptive, and must always be used with discretion by any design team. In particular, a small single-developer project such as the one which forms the basis of your assignment would not expect to use every detail of every step. You must select the parts of the methodology which you use with care.
 

1. Organisational Strategy.

Every web project is carried out to meet - in some sense - the goals of an organisation. The organisation in question could range from a large multi-national business (which might need a comprehensive advertising and e-commerce site) to a casually-linked group of individuals sharing some interest (who might communicate via a site dedicated to some pastime). A web site should only really be developed when a set of organisational needs can be identified, or it will be constructed and exist in a vacuum. The thinking behind a web-site should be focused on a real-world problem.

The commercially-focused approach of the Vivid Design Studios methodology shows how complex this thinking might be:

All commercial projects need to consider key business issues, but online ventures require more in-depth understandings of a company’s corporate mission and its preparedness for meeting its goals. During this phase, core business needs are addressed, from market analysis and brand development to staffing, partnerships, and capitalization. During this phase, the company’s success is most important, as opposed to the success of a specific project. This development involves participation at the highest levels of a company’s management and has long-range and long-lasting implications. These activities often include the overall development or evolution of corporate or site brands and the needs of sites to address organizational change. Here are some examples of the activities and documents that might be produced at this stage:

• Business Strategy Development: Business Case. An organisation is constantly trying to develop and adapt to a changing environment. A new media venture such as the development of a web site must make sense within the overall strategy of the organisation. Before resources are expended on a development, a case must be made for the investment involved.
• Media Strategy: Media Strategy Plan. An organisation should have a strategy for communicating with its client base, and attracting new clients, via exposure in the media. Communicating via the new media, although novel and rather different from communicating via old media, must fit into a wider strategy.
• Competitor and Market Trends Analysis: Competitive Market Research. An organisation has to learn from its competitors and understand the market in which it is operating. A new media venture has to obey the same principles: it must operate in a market with other related ventures from other organisation.
• Experience (Creative) Audit: Creative Brief. An organisation can only create a new media product that is within its capacities and experience, and there is no point in embarking on a venture for which an organisation is not properly equipped. From an analysis of skills and past ventures a creative brief (a 'vision statement') for a venture which is realistic and achievable can be set out.
• Methodology Development and Customization: Process Audit, Customised Methodology, Training Development. A new media venture may require an organisation to re-think its development processes and expand its skills base - it must be equipped for the task it sets itself.
• Technology Audit (Assessment and Evaluation): Technology Brief. An organisation must possess the software tools and development platforms required for a new media venture, and it must only set itself goals which are achievable with its technology (or that which it can realistically obtain).
• Technology Development & Evolution Strategy: Technology Research and Plan. In view of the above, an organisation should plan to evolve its technological base so that it can keep up with its competitors and meet the expectations of its market.
• Organizational Growth and Structure Planning: Staffing Plan and Candidates. New staff with specialised skills may have to be obtained.

Note that not all companies need a extensive development in each area. However, if asked questions pertaining to any of these issues, a company’s management should have answers for all of these by the end of this phase and before any specific development projects (such as a website) start. Some of these activities may be addressed from time to time, but these decisions should last for longer than one project

The project which forms the basis of the assignment assumes that much of this thinking has already been done, and that the project is being initiated within a broader plan (it is part of the 'UK-Online' initiative which aims to improve the communication between central government and citizens). Write a brief outline of the apparent intentions behind UK-Online, and the need for informing citizens about how government policies impinge on their lives. This outline can form part of the introduction to your documentation.

As an exercise, perform an audit of your skills base, the technologies available to you, and the technologies and skills which you might reasonably acquire during the course of this module. Keep a note of the results, and when you develop your design and plan your implementation keep your audit in mind.

2. Pre-Project Planning

This stage of the methodology asumes that the basic outlines of the project are in place, and that there is a firmly-established organisational need which sets its main goals. These goals, the target users, the 'marketplace' into which the site fits, the characteristics of the web medium, and internal organisational resources must now be further examined so that some initial resource planning and budgeting can be carried out. The project planners need some outline answers to the questions:

• What do I want the site to accomplish, sell, or promote?
• Who are my users and what do they want and need?
• What competitive advantage will the site offer over others?
• How can I take advantage of the Web medium?
• What should I consider when creating the project schedule?

The planners can then begin to estimate the resources - time, staff, technology, etc. - the project requires. The development process for a project is wrapped in a management layer responsible for the meeting of deadlines, schedules, budgets, and the building of teams and relationships throughout the project. The output of this planning process is a proposal document, fleshing out the project, along with an estimated budget and timescale.

2.1 Scheduling a Project.

There are well-established project planning and management techniques which formalise the process of scheduling; but the following simple instructions will suffice for these notes.

Create a schedule to help ensure that you meet your development deadline. Start by making a table which lists each step in your process, followed by the number of working days each step will take to complete. Include user tests throughout the plan. Next work out each step into a Gantt chart. You need to consider those steps that occur serially versus those occurring in parallel, and a Gantt chart is a good format for visualizing the relationship between these steps. Also consider weekend and holiday dates which will be recognised by your team. In order to control your schedule throughout the project, it is critical to understand which steps of the project are affected if there is a change in the completion date of any individual step.

Return to your table and list the completion dates for each step, based on your Gantt chart. Of course, you may also need to revise the number of days allotted to certain steps in your table as well as in your Gantt chart in order to accommodate your deadlines.

Development is characterised by a process consisting of a series of stages. In successful development these stages naturally occur in sequence, however it is inevitable that discoveries made during one stage will cause you to revisit a previous stage. For instance, you may begin making a prototype which you believe is based on a good idea, but as you see the physical prototype develop, you may realise you need to reconsider some aspect of that original idea. You should not expect each stage of the process to go perfectly the first time. The cyclical nature of the development process is also known as "iterative design". Your plan should allow time for more than one pass through each stage of the process.

It is difficult for you to schedule the work of a module such as this one, since you are going through the first cycle of a learning process. However, you can 'plan' your project retrospectively and draw up a table and Gantt chart when you have finished. Keep a note of all the major activities that you carry out on the development of your web site for this module, and include the result as your 'project plan' in the final documentation. This will be good experience for future work.

2.2 Budgeting and Personnel

In a production environment all resources to be used by a project must be planned and costed, and this includes making sure that all software used is properly commercially licensed:

• Personnel: technicians, designers, and editors to maintain the server and the content
• Hardware: production machines as well as a hardware test environment for staging and testing the site
• Server: either a server, domain name, and network lines, or an ISP for hosting your site (Make sure the server you will use is capable of handling the programs you want it to run, such as Java, and the amount of traffic you expect it to receive)
• Software: search engines, authoring tools, visual design tools, scripts to support feedback mechanisms, database software

Similarly, a team with all the requisite skills to complete the project must be assembled, and - probably - their involvement phased and shared with other projects. Make certain you have the skills necessary to complete a Web development project. Below is a list of skill areas and the activities that must be completed within those areas. The exact titles and number of people who fill these functions will vary according to the size and goals of the project and the organization.

• Project Management
- Client contact
- Communication of project requirements
- Project scheduling
- Budget planning
- Resource allocation
- Assures copyright compliance
• Usability Engineering
- Users and task analysis
- Communication of user and functional requirements
- Management of user evaluation of design
• Media Design
- Information structure design
- Prototype design
- Design of communication concept and physical media
- Design of physical interface, navigation, interaction
- Style guide writing
• Content Management
- Provision of domain-specific knowledge
- Writing and editing
• Implementation
- Planning hardware and software requirements
- Programming and scripting
- Producing imagery, sound, and other content elements
- Performance testing (testing for speed, accuracy of link connections)
- Accessibility testing (alt text on images, titles on frames and pages, etc.)
- Site transfer to server
• Maintenance
- Maintenance on content and links
- Server maintenance, database support
- Creation of content updates (text, graphics, programming)
- Quality, performance, and accessibility testing of any new content
- Customer/user support and communications
- File administration

2.3 Schedule user involvement

Scheduling user involvement appropriately in various stages of the development process will improve the effectiveness of your design. Remember to allow time in your schedule to make the changes that testing indicates are necessary. The best time to involve users is early in the planning and designing stages, so that you will have time to make changes based on their responses and still meet your deadline. The following types of user input and feedback are particularly valuable:

• Gain input from users on the goal and content of the site
• Gain input from users on the organization of the content
• Gain feedback from users on the proposed site visuals and/or site metaphor
• Gain feedback from users on site navigation
• Provide a way to get feedback from users once the site is published

You can use colleagues on the same module to provide this service, or - and this is probably better for the assignment brief you have been given - you can use friends from other courses (naive users?) who don't have any preconceptions about the material or your designs.

2.4 Competitive and Market Analysis

A web site does not exist in isolation, it exists in an environment in which users can easily access sites that offer the same kind of information or services elsewhere. In the case of a site that exists to provide information (education, public information, etc.) this means that you should try and provide a distinctive viewpoint. In a more commercial setting, this will mean that you want to to compete effectively in the marketplace, and know your competitors and your own relative strengths and weaknesses. Create a design strategy that capitalises on your strengths and on what you have to offer that is unique. Remember that your competitors will not be standing still; they may be developing new sites while you are evaluating their current ones. Aim to make your site better than what you think their next releases might offer.

You should do a thorough search to identify potentially cometing sites, and analyse what they say and do. The more thoroughly you research who your competitors are, the more this information will help clarify and strengthen your strategy.

• Use a keyword search to find other sites with a similar focus and bookmark them for continued reference
• Ask users who your competitors are
• Check back with these sites frequently in order to see how they are advancing

Rate your competitors' sites and your own site using the list of questions below. You can do the evaluation yourself, or better, you could ask users to do the evaluation. This comparative evaluation will help you determine how you can create a site that is superior to your competitors' sites. It will also help you determine which aspects of your site you may need or want to improve.

• Is the purpose of the site clear?
• Does the site clearly address a particular audience?
• Is the site useful and relevant to its audience?
• Is the site interesting and engaging?
• Does the site enable users to accomplish all the tasks they need or want to accomplish?
• Can these tasks be accomplished easily?
• Is the information organised in a way that users will expect and understand?
• Is the most important information easiest to find?
• Is textual information clear, grammatically correct, and easy to read?
• Do you have a clear idea of what the site contains?
• Do you always know where you are, and how to get where you want to go?
• Is the presentation attractive?
• Do pages load quickly enough?

This applies equally to other media presentations of your subject matter. Your goal is to develop a site that competes effectively not only against the websites of your competitors, but also against the work they might do in other media. Analyse how other media, such as broadcast or print, present your subject matter, and come up with unique and valuable features a website might offer that these other media cannot.

Your assignment task is in an area which is well-covered by other web sites and printed material. Much of your time in the first 2 or 3 weeks of this module should be taken up looking for this information, gathering it together, and analysing it. Begin this task now with a web search. Be sure to identify the major organisations with an interest in global warming and strategies to combat it (e.g. the United Nations, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, etc.) and also organisations with a diametrically-opposed point of view (fossil fuel lobbies, the US Republican party). You have to know enough about the issues and the way that they are presented to be able to come up with a comprehensible structure and navigation strategy for your site, and produce well-presented content.

2.5 Continued Planning.

Although, by definition, pre-project planning is over when a project actually begins, planning is not. Many of these planning activities must continue and be revised as events overtake them. An important activity is to make sure that a project planning document is always up to date and available to the working team, so that they can understand the context in which they are working. Create a document that will guide and unify the efforts of the team, and/or clarify your intentions for the client. You may want to do your project plan on an intranet using a range of web technologies. Your project plan should gradually build to include the following information:

• Goals definition
• User/audience profile and evaluation
• Results from task analysis
• Competitive analysis
• General strategy
• Projection of recommended web development tools, and how and why they may be used
• Prioritization of content into that which is necessary, and that which is merely desirable (consider whether desirable content can be added in the future)
• Team assignments and individual responsibilities
• Team communication mechanisms (meetings, databases, minutes, distribution lists)
• Activity tracking processes to manage who is doing what
• Problem and issue management processes

Schedule and publish date

Obviously, as you are doing individual work, you don't have the problem of communicating with a team; but you do have the problem of communicating with yourself - and this is not as trivial a task as you might think. Keep a simplified version of this project plan throughout your development effort; it should make you more efficient. If you wish to impress, then you can include it as an appendix to your assignment documentation (it won't be included in the page count).