a metaphor for understanding design
Sometimes it's hard to understand just why a website costs so much - it's just a few pages you could make on your word processor yourself right? Wrong! For every website there is an infrastructure that it's built on. There are building codes - just like a house - so it's visible on all browsers. You also have an image it's trying to project that sells your business - you wouldn't want to build your house out of scrap siding and leftover shingles.
Good structure makes it easier to maintain and add to, but also improves your chances of search engines finding it. It needs to be viewable in browsers world wide (you did notice there are hundreds of character sets and fonts around the globe!). And should be pleasing to the eye in all of those browsers (each computer and browser will render a site differently). The navigation has to make sense - you wouldn't put the toilet in the kitchen would you? And it has to be accessible - doors and windows must open which means your site has to work without a lot of broken links. 
In a sense, when you are building a website, you are building a virtual house for your friends, neighbors, colleagues and customers to visit - and you wouldn't want a house without plumbing or furniture would you? It wouldn't be very nice to visit, much less to live in. Your house is a reflection of your personal tastes and style - and so is your website.
Would you really decorate your house with blinking lights and velvet paintings and put a leopard print couch next to the polka dot armoir with striped walls? (a lot of people do this with animated gifs and weird fonts). And for functionality - would you really want to make your guests go next door to use the bathroom and kitchen? I don't think they'd stay long if you did. And most of all it has to be functional - stairways have to go somewhere, windows should open to the outside, and the bath tub shouldn't be in the living room!
Likewise your website. Created tastefully, with built-in functionality, it will make your web visitors feel welcome and stay to purchase your products - just like a well designed, well decorated home makes you want to stick around and have coffee. If your website should project professionalism - when it does, your visitors will consider you a professional.
Your website house should reflect what you do. You might sell children's toys and want to project a fun and happy image - or a funeral home will want to project a serious, caring image. You won't see monkey-bars in a funeral home or lilies in a preschool. You can throw together a shack or build a mansion - but regardless it must reflect who you are.
If your website were a house, it might need:
- An address (the domain name) & lot to build on (hosting)
- Several Rooms (the web pages)
- A contractor or handyman to add on, fix & repair (website designer)
- A blueprint (contract with specifications you desire)
- Rough carpentry & roof (underlying structure and “site map” of the website)
- Insulation, plumbing and wiring – you don’t see them, but they make the house nice to live in (usability, navigation)
- A template site is like a modular house – you can change a few things, but are basically stuck with the main layout and design. If you change too many things, maybe you need a stick-built website.
- Adding or changing rooms affects roof, plumbing, electrical, structure...maybe now you’ll require a couple more bathrooms or appliances to support additional rooms. (you wouldn’t have a 10 bedroom house with just one bathroom would you?)
- And don’t forget, if you expect to someday have a family room, don’t put the pool there or it will have to be ripped out at extra expense when you put in the family room
- Changing the main colors is like tearing out the brick and making the siding vynal and changing the shingles from asphalt to wood shakes, making photo and text format changes is like redecorating a room with new furniture and carpet. Of course, once you frame out the basic structure of the house, you start to make it your own…
- The kitchen is your homepage – it’s the most important room in the house – it can be simple with nothing more than a sink (logo) or have lots of features: refrigerator (mailing list), microwave (graphics), stove (hot Flash graphics), utinsels/cookware (keywords), pine or imported cherry wood cabinets (the design).
- Hallways (links within your site)
- Phone lines (links to other sites)
- Bathrooms (support pages for your main pages – sometimes you see them, sometimes you don’t even realize they’re there but you can’t go without them!)
- Draperies & Blinds (scripts) which can be either Off-the-rack vs. custom tailored
- Stairways (submission forms) that can be circular and fancy (complex forms) or straight (simple forms) and you might want a railing on either (validation)
- Big front porch (Flash or other intro page that leads you into the site)
- How will you furnish your rooms? (the content) Furniture & decor (photos & text)
- An attic full of stuff (the working files you never see that create the graphics or install scripts)
It's also nice to have:
- A mailbox (email using your domain name)
- An answering machine (auto-responders)
- A phone book listing so people can find your address (Search engines & Directories)
- If the house is quite upscale, it might have….
- Intercom system (forums) and home Theatre (photo gallery or multimedia like music or video)
- A library (database) with a back door to an apartment that only the maid uses (admin access for the database)
- A safe on the wall or hidden passageways (password protected areas of the site)
- Fireplace, Hot tub, Game Room (games, polls, interactive features that make people want to return to your site and hang out)
- Sprinkler system (advanced meta tags), Maid and Butler (CMS - content management system)
Other Considerations:
- Your lawn may look different depending on the season (monitors & browsers)
- In web design, sometimes you build the house first, THEN find the lot (hosting)
- Friendly Neighborhood (world wide web - .com – the business district, .org – clubs and organizations, .gov – government buildings, .net – everyone else)
- A lot with enough land and the right topography for the house (hosting with certain features required by your website)
- Land prices vary depending on location and amenities (hosting features)
- Sometimes the lot includes extras like a fence, a walkway, flowers and a gazebo (hosting pre-installed scripts like guestbooks, statistics, counters, etc.)
- You'll want any additions to the house (forums, galleries, guestbooks) to match (you wouldn't put colonial furniture in one room and contemporary in another....)
- A car to get there (ISP-internet service provider like AOL, Comcast, Juno, etc)
- Extra keys to open things in the house (password protected areas or browser plug-ins to view certain items)
If you work out of your home with a business (online store) you might need the following:
- The store can be part of the house, in a spare bedroom, or
- Located in an office or retail building (hosting located on a separate secure server)
- Shopping baskets and product displays (shopping cart)
- Cash register (payment method such as merchant account)
- A security system (secure certificate)
- Good advertising (search engine optimization)
- A revolving door to let more people in and out (bandwidth / transfer)
- Customer service (contact methods – forms, message boards, online chat, etc.)
- A dumbwaiter to the basement (product database) and a back door for employees to enter (admin access for the store)
- Sometimes the store uses a simple cash register (Paypal), and sometimes needs something more elaborate depending on what is sold (need a merchant account, gateway, etc.)
If you need land for your web house - these are some excellent hosting providers at reasonable prices!
Need to update your decor or build a new house? We can help!