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Designing an organization’s home page
Dr. Scott MooreMREACH: Summer 2007

This page describes the process you should go through in order to design and create an organization's home page. Online resources that would be helpful in this process are available on this page.

  1. Sign up for Google account
  2. Sign up for GMail account
  3. Go to Pages and create a site
    1. Keep colors to a minimum. Be consistent with this usage throughout your site.
    2. Keep graphics to a minimum. If you use photos, use real images of real people or products connected to your company.
  4. Basic information
    1. Organization name
    2. Tagline
    3. Page title
  5. Make a list of Web site actions, events, and resources.
    1. Without looking at any (more?) sites related to what you want to do, make a list of every possible thing that you want your site to do. Write all of these on many little tiny sheets of paper.
    2. Group these sheets into smaller groups.
    3. Come up with a label for each of these groups.
    4. Now, look at Web sites for other related companies and get some inspiration for what else you might include in your site.
    5. Add new little sheets of paper to your existing sheets (and label them appropriately).
    6. These group labels will become the major menu headers in the left menu bar.
  6. Main tasks
    1. Come up with a list of the one to four main tasks that users will undertake when they visit the site.
    2. Provide a clear starting point (probably in the center of the page) on the home page for each of these four main tasks.
  7. Reveal the contents of your site. Don't just provide links to the content (though you should do that) — show some of it on the home page. You should probably put this in the center column of your site.
  8. In the right column of your site offer easy access to recent home page features. You should put all of your navigation aids in this column.