The analogy has been used for some time, so this blog post is probably long overdue: The process for building a website is very similar to the process of building a house. Not to say that your website needs a Spanish-tiled roof or more stucco than your competition, this comparison holds most true in reference to how the steps interrelate. From start to finish both projects rely on following an order of operations, or else seriously bad consequences could, and often do, arise. Over the next 3 blog posts: (Planning, Design, Construction), let's break the order of operations down and focus on the similarities, as well as the minute differences.

Planning

Every project that is expected to run on time, on budget, and on scope will inevitably have a planning phase. With home construction, as well as web design, the first step in planning involves getting a handle on the scope of the project. It is important to understand how many people will be living in the house, in order to know how many bedrooms, and bathrooms the house will need. Perhaps our house is not a house at all, but a shopping mall instead. The financiers of the world's first 3 bedroom 2 bathroom shopping mall would be considerably disappointed if the details of the project aren't discussed prior to design. Understanding the purpose of your website is a lot like understanding the intended use of your building, you need to know: 1.) Who is using this website.  2.) What they are expected to get from the website.  With web design we start by determining who your possible user personas are, making a list of the possible scenarios for the different types of users and the different expectations that come with each. The list of residents for a house may include a mother, a father, and two children, but in some instances it may have a grandfather living with them who's in a wheelchair.  As a home builder you wouldn't put all the bathrooms and bedrooms on the second floor of the house, knowing that the grandfather would be living there. With website user personas, considerations and accessibility options may need to be made in order to make services accessible to all possible user types.

Where are the differences? The differences in the planning phases of home-building and website design are in the fact that website design is a more democratic process. This sounds great aloud, but what it means is that website design must be done to take into consideration the greatest good for the greatest number, and that some very specific cases may not get their potential full-consideration in the design of a website. This is a result  of the size of the potential audience a website can reach. The closest equatable example from the home-building world is planned communities where one design is chosen as the "model home" and this model is designed with a multitude of democratic considerations based on who may live in the house. In the case of the grandfather, or the potential for grandfather rather, this means that the model home will have at least 1 bedroom and 1 bathroom on the first floor, and at least 1 entry that is ground accessible. This is why it's important to establish who your target audience is up front, based on who the current and potential users of your product are, and how to best reach them. Two drastic examples from the web: a website selling sports equipment and a website selling hearing aids. The complexities around the use and design of BOTH of these product are maybe easiest explained through the use of online video content. The sports equipment website may make concessions regarding audio accessibility in order to provide its target audience of 18-24 year old men and women with the most riveting user experience possible. Where as the hearing aid website will certainly need to take into consideration any audio content on it's site, videos will need to have captions, or potentially no video at all.

Next Post: Design