Website development.The recommended activities. Part 3 - Essay Example

Webmonkey 3 Introduction "Now that you know what your site is going to be about and who it is for, you are ready to pinpoint what it will contain.Everyone around you is starting to get ideas, and some of them may even have a mental image of what the site should look like. You need to harness this creative energy and channel it into a productive process. You already have an agreement on the goals and audience, and you will be using the process that everyone is familiar with by now" (Shiple, 2008, pg. 3). The purpose of this paper is to read through Lesson 3, and carry out as many of the recommended activities as possible.

Core Lessons This section of the tutorial deals with site content. The first step is to identify the content of the site, as well as its functional requirements. Next will be to group and label the content and then to add the content and functions to the design document (Shiple, 2008). The author describes several different types of content: dynamic, functional, static, and transactional. He also describes various types of functional requirements that the site will need to have. These include pages for members to log on, pages for users to sign up for newsletters, and other pages that contain forms or are needed for transactions to take place.

After the list is created by the lead manager on the project, it should be combined with the lists compiled by everyone else and perfected (Shiple, 2008). The next step is to organize. "Order out of chaos - that's what this step is all about. Here you organize the content and define the basis for the site's structure. Begin by writing each element of the content inventory on an index card. Take the cards and organize them into groups. (You will want a big table to do this.) Try organizing them in different ways.

When you are satisfied with how you have grouped things, name each group; try to be as descriptive as possible, and avoid being verbose. Record the name of each group and the elements within it" (Shiple, 2008, pg. 3). The final step of this process is to make a new section in the design document for all of the materials that have been created and organized herein. "Include a summary of the content inventory. Add a section about how the content is grouped and named. Add the list of functional requirements with a summary, if you like.

The content inventory should be included as an appendix to the design document. Remember to publish these results so that everyone can see them" (Shiple, 2008, pg. 3). Activities Recommended The activities here also seem easy enough to perform, but once again none of them were able to be carried out since there was no organization available to practice on. The main lesson learned information architecture as a socio-technical issue from the tutorial format, above and beyond what was learned from other sources was that the simple, easy-to-follow, step-by-step format made it much easier to understand that just reading about the process and its definition alone.

The organization component of this section of the tutorial also helped hone previously learned skills a lot. Conclusion The purpose of this paper has been to read through Lesson 3, and carry out as many of the recommended activities as possible. Although the activities could not be carried out because of the fact that there was no organization to practice them on, they are well-documented for future use and will be carried out as soon as the opportunity arises. Reference Shiple, J. (2008).

Information architecture tutorial. Webmonkey. Retrieved March 19, 2008, from http://www.webmonkey.com/webmonkey/design/site_building/tutorials/tutorial1.html