5), which began as a hand-drawn sketch and then was re?¬? ned on
the computer. A wireframe represents a page layout as simple boxes
with black-and-white text and gray rectangles for images. There is
no effort at this point to represent the visual look of the site, and this
A note on how sites get built in the
corporate world??¦
Development of large sites is
almost always driven by a business
requirements document, which
describes the user needs for the
site and the functionality that must
be provided to meet those needs.
In order to end up with a site that
meets these requirements, the next
step is to create a content list that
describes what content is going into
the site, and a functional speci?¬? cation
that describes the features that
need to be programmed and how
they will work. Next comes site
architecture, which is where the real
design work begins.
BUILDING WEB PAGES 237
FIGURE 7.4 A simple architecture
diagram for the Stylin??™ site.
allows the focus to be on issues of organization, hierarchy, and overall
balance of the layout, without getting sidetracked by determining
the right shade of blue or the precise cropping of graphics. There??™s a
time for such work, but it??™s too distracting right now.
Web Design Is Not Just Visual Design
At the Voices that Matter Conference in San Francisco in October 2007, I heard
several designers ask if this structure-driven approach could work for them,
as they always start from the visual design of the page and then build from
there.
Pages:
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277