Website
Planning Worksheet
This questionnaire
is designed to enhance communications between Web Design Inc. and our clients.
Why don't you print it on your printer, and have it handy
when you discuss your project on the phone with a Web Design
Inc. representative. After you've filled in the blanks
as we talk on the phone, please make a photocopy for
your records, and mail a signed copy to us. It provides
a written memorandum of our mutually-agreed plan.
Organization Name: __________________________
1. Purpose
Give the most important
purpose a "1",
next most important a "2". Leave those blank which do
not interest you at all.
__ To gain a favorable impression of the company or organization.
__ To develop a qualified list of prospects
__ To sell products directly taking credit card information over the
Internet
__ To encourage potential customers to contact us by phone or mail to
consummate a sale.
__ To make available product information and price lists to
distributors.
__ To make available product information and price lists to
customers.
__ To strengthen brand identification.
__ Other _______________________________________________________
2. Site Organization
Please list what
pages you'll need on your web site. Some examples are "About us" "Products" "What's
New", etc
Total number
of pages decided upon ________________
3. Site and Domain Names
Site Name on Masthead: ____________________________________
Domain Name It must be registered through your
web hosting service and approved by a domain registration
service before you can use it. You may check the availability
of your domain name at Network Solutions (http://www.networksolutions.com)
Domain name ____________________________ ___Desired
___Already Registered
4. Header Graphic
It is very helpful if you
will include a copy of your company's letterhead, brochures,
catalog, etc. so we can see how you present your company
image.
__ Company Logo incorporated in the masthead graphic? If so, please
enclose a color copy.
__ Photo or drawing of product?
__ Typeface preference __________________________________________
__ Preferred colors in palette (PMS colors?) _______________________________________
__ Other ideas _________________________________________________________
5. Color and Accents
For the most part, we recommend a white
background for best readability and contrast, with a
band of color or a pattern running down the left margin
of the webpage. Your preference:
May we include a link at the bottom of
the welcome page which reads "Website Designed by
Web Design Inc."? (You are under no obligation
to say yes.) ___Yes ___No
6. Navigation System
The navigation system of all our Standard
Website Packages includes:
- Links from the front
page and sectional pages to every page in the system
to
enable Web search engines to "spider" and index content
on every page.
- Colored bar "Image Map" with
a brief word or two indicating each page -- or,
in larger sites -- each section of the website. This
appears
at the bottom of every page. In some sites we put
this both top and bottom. You are limited to a maximum
of
about eight (8) selections on this image map. We
use server side image maps to make it easy to expand
the
site at a later time without having to change the
coding on each page of the site. For this reason,
and to keep
costs down, we do not include separate "buttons" on
our standard sites. Included in sites of 6 pages
or more.
- Left-Side Menus with text links
are especially useful on larger sites. Included in
sites of 6 pages or more. They can allow more detail
than an 8-item bottom image map, and can enable visitors
to see from any page how to get to any other. These
may be white or light-colored over a dark left-side
color or pattern, or black or dark over a light left-side
color or pattern.
Optional Systems. Circle those
you wish incorporated in your site.
- Left-Side "Buttons" can be used,
but we do not recommend them, since they are more expensive
and time consuming to maintain when a change or addition
is made to the system. Also, it takes significantly
longer to load many buttons than an image map of the
same area (Extra charge)
- Frames System where,
typically, a scrolling menu remains on the left
side to provide
navigation. We do not recommend frames in practically
any situation, since they are a design disaster.
They do not always print out, cannot be bookmarked
easily,
and often make the page design look "tacky" with
their ugly gray scroll bars. We see them as the
amateur's
way to look cool. In a very few cases, they are
useful: (1) to display large databases of information,
(2)
purposely hide URLs of content pages, (3) send
visitors to other sites while making it easy for
them to come
back. (Extra charge)
- Search Engine is useful on larger
sites of 20+ pages to help visitors quickly find what
they're looking for. (Extra charge)
7. Basic Page Elements
These are the important
items which appear on nearly every webpage on your site
(except the "home" page).
- Page titles which show at top
of Web browser only
- Top-of-page graphic based on
the design of the masthead graphic
- Page Title in larger type. Heading
Font Style: ________________ (recommend Arial Bold)
- Text. Body Font Style: ___________________
(recommend Times New Roman)
- Image Map by Image Map bar
- Standard company ID near bottom
of page
- E-mail response link to the
following e-mail address: _________________________
- Copyright and trademark information in
small print at the bottom of every page. What registered
trademarks, trademarks, and service marks does your
company want to indicate here?
Do you have any trademarks or service
marks? If so, please list them here and indicate which
are registered trademarks.
8. Photos, Graphics, Animations, Sound, and Video
Our contract includes a statement that
you own the copyright to, or have permission from the
copyright owner to use any photos or graphics you send
us.
- Clipart tends to look a bit
tacky on websites. We recommend photos.
- Photos you supply either by
sending the photos themselves for us to scan and return,
or by sending the digitized images on a diskette.
- Stock photos obtained from Photodisc
(http://www.photodisc.com), Corel (http://commerce.corel.com),
or PictureQuest (http://www.picturequest.com/). (You
write down the photo number and inform us of your choices,
and which page each photo goes on. We can help you
select the photos, but we would need to bill you for
our time at our hourly rate.)
For an extra charge, we can equip your
webpages with:
- Sound, either MIDI musical background
or streaming Real Audio for music or voice.
- Animated GIF images. High quality
photo images are available from PhotoDisc (http://www.photodisc.com)
and other sources. We can also make animations for
an extra charge.
- Shockwave Animations
- Video clips
9. Response Forms
What is the purpose of your response form?
__ Guestbook for visitors to record
comments
__ Request for information
__ Survey of customer preferences
Note: We
do not set up sites that use the response form as an
order form, since these
require
secure servers, and secure order pick-up. For one or two
products we recommend using ShopSite Lite with a secure
server. We charge extra to set up the
ordering system.
10. Web Hosting Service
We are not in the web hosting business.
We recommend to our clients web hosting services tailored
to their specific needs. We've worked with dozens of
hosting services -- the good, the bad, and the ugly.
We usually do not recommend hosting on your local dial-up
ISP, since they too often are not well-prepared to meet
specialized business site hosting needs. Their main business
is usually dial-up access, and hosting is only a sideline
for them. Please let us recommend a Web host service
for you. We require cgi-bin access and FTP access, and
strongly recommend telnet access. Our no-extra-cost response
form also requires a Unix system with Perl language available.
Web Hosting Service _____________________________________
Phone: _____________________________
E-mail for support or help ______________________________
11. Registering and Advertising Your Website
Consider:
- Advertising your Website to Web search
engines that index the Web
- Giving customers a good reason to come
by offering them something
- Finding industry-wide linking pages
and negotiating reciprocal links to and from their
webpages.
- Purchasing Web advertising
- Becoming active in several of the thousands
of Internet news groups and mailing lists
- Developing a "signature" mini-ad
attached to all your e-mail messages
- Making your website part
of one or more of the many "malls."
- Including your e-mail and Web addresses
on all your company's print literature, stationery,
and display advertising
- E-mail newsletters
Information about number of visitors
to your website can usually be obtained from
your Internet Service Provider, from statistics generated
daily by such programs as WWWSTAT, GETSTATS, or Analog
on the host computer. We do not include page counters
on our Standard Website Packages
We submit your information to Web
search engines to "register" your website
after final payment is received. Before doing this
we work with you to get 50 to 100 keywords and a carefully
constructed 25-word sentence contain the most important
keywords.
12. Maintenance
Target Date____________________
Package prices include minor updating
over the first six months of the contract. This covers
minor price changes, product changes, etc. It does not
include major changes, such as changing newsletter content
(which essentially involves constructing a new webpage),
which is billed at our hourly rate.
Target Date for final payment to
be made and your Web Site to be advertised: _____________
On behalf of my
organization I approve the above plan which I have developed
with Web Design
Inc. to construct a website, and I authorize Web Design
Inc. to use this Website Planning Worksheet as the basis
of the project.
Signature _____________________________________ Date _________________
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