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Subject:Project scheduling? From:"Geoff Hart (by way of \"Eric J. Ray\" <ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com>)" <ght -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> Date:Sat, 13 Feb 1999 04:56:37 -0700
William Marin is <<...designing a website from scratch. I mean I
started with the project proposal and nothing else. Can anyone
provide me with a good schedule of steps that I can follow to produce
this site?>>
Peter Kent's book ("Poor Richard's Web site"), though pricey,
provides a good overview of understanding why you want to create a
web site, what you hope to accomplish with it, and how to get there
from here. There's a more focused (for your specific needs) book from
O'Reilly and Associates, whose name escapes me, that deals with
information architecture for the Web; hopefully someone else on
techwr-l can provide the details.
<<For example I know design comes before implemenation
which comes before usability testing.>>
Not necessarily, though it's certainly important to include usability
testing (with your audience) as a final component. Jared Spool is a
big advocate of what he calls "paper prototyping", and I agree with
his logic: you can do some really effective usability testing right
at the prototupe stage, long before you begin the actual
implementation. I'm sure one of the folks from User Interface
Engineering on the list can forward you his article on the subject,
but in the meantime, the basic concept is to create a crude but
accurate sketch of what you want to do on paper, and pretend it's the
real McCoy: pretend to click on a link, then jump to the piece of
paper it points to. You can quickly identify problems with obscurely
worded text (sending you to the wrong piece of paper), too-deep
hierarchies (too much clicking around), and so on.
--Geoff Hart @8^{)} Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
