When you and your team set out to either create a new web site or redesign and existing one, there are several procedures you really need to follow to ensure a successful launch of the site. This page, an any related pages, will provide you with information and some exiting tools you really should have in your design toolbox.

1. Gather Information: Survey your peers, and department heads, for content and feature ideas

2. Understand Your Audience: Who will be visiting and why? A web site should be clear and efficient

3. Analyze Similar Sites: Take the time to evaluate similar sites to see what works and what doesn't

4. Create a Project Plan: Create a plan that lists all major and minor milestones in the project.
    1. List all people in the design project and their responsibilities
    2. Build your design team(s)
    3. As different project phases are completed, make sure the are reviewed and approved.

5. Layout your Site: look at the proposed content and organization before you start
    1. Decide how the pages should appear, their layout, menu locations, search box locations, etc.
    2. Decide how the Site Map should appear and what it should contain
    3. Create any style sheets you intend to use to control the appearance of the overall site

6. Design and Prototype: Use a graphics program to layout your page design.
    1. Create multiple views and show them to your peers to get their reaction.
    2. Determine a way to get user feedback after the site is launched
        (e.g. a feedback email link on each page)
    3. Remember that color can invoke an emotional response on views.

7. Build & Test: Begin to write the HTML code for your pages (or let the software do it).

8. Web, Graphics, and Content Editing software
    1. Dreamweaver MX 2004 allows you to spend your time designing and not hand-coding
    2. Fireworks MX 2004 lets you create, optimize, and slice images; build navigation menus
    3. Contribute 3 empowers content providers to edit specific sections of web pages you create

9. Page Creation Order
    1. Create the Home Page and ONE secondary page first
    2. Test these pages in a variety of ways to make sure they behave as you designed them.
    3. Get the final tested pages approved, then use them as a model for all the rest
    4. Create Templates for others to use so they may contribute similar pages

10. Web Accessibility Standards: Web sites should comply with the ADA Standards

11. Launch, Evaluate, Maintain Once the site is up, gather user feedback to fine-tune the site as necessary