Design process
Web design was often a one man show until media companies started to see real marketing openings to reach for bigger audiences. Web teams are built by combining different professional sectors such as graphic designers, text editors, programmers, even art directors and marketing managers. The challenge in a product such as Webnode is to use the limited possibilities to adapt a communication and information design likely to positively influence its website audience with a range of easy to use tools.
To begin with, and following Webnode step-by-step website creation tool, is nessassary to find an appropriate slogan that reflects the essence of the website. The design process will be reinforced with clear guidelines based on the company’s goals and visions. The second step is the choice of a graphic design template that would reflect the company’s style and give some authority . The third step consists in elaborating a easy navigation system based on a range of necessary content pages that helps focus on defined goals. All three steps provided by the Webnode team helped elaborate a coherent design to target the right audience and calibrate the proper balance between text, images and web tools for more comprehensible web content. But design process is not always about graphics, images and content, it also has to appeal to the users by using web tools they like.
This is where the Web 2.0 tools come into action and empower the website with interactive content and hybrid applications. We could call these Mashups. Mashup is a combination of an already existing web application (in our case Webnode) with other Web 2.0 tools known as widgets and gadgets (Maps, forums, community platform add-ons, etc.). The secret of course is to keep the user on our website and not let them “zap” to another tempting community platform, mentioning no names. A full and seamless integration of these gadgets into the content platform is therefore highly appreciated. And again, the great thing about Webnode combined with Mashups is its simplicity.
“Mashup composition tools are usually simple enough to be used by end-users. They generally do not require programming skills and rather support visual wiring of GUI widgets, services and components together”(Wikipedia.org).
The next blog entry is a review on "Webnode".