Design - Design Focus and Evaluation
Evaluating and testing your website at every phase of conceptualization, design, and development will save time and resources. Just as you gathered input from your staff and stakeholders about what they thought should be on your museum website, you may wish to collect data on how well the visual design elements work for your audience early in the design phase. Use a checklist to test your design elements.
Evaluation strategies also provide a means for managing multiple inputs throughout the design phase, as it has been suggested that committees should not craft the visual design parameters for websites. Having input from a committee can be counter-productive to your needs. Too many voices at the design table can dilute the message, complicate the visual design and technology requirements, and delay the progression of development. Website designers suggest having one or two people develop the visual design for your website and make mock-ups or prototypes of individual web pages. Once the visual designs have been pulled together, you can put the prototypes to a committee or focus group for input, suggestions, and feedback. Committees and focus groups are excellent bodies for mirroring the responses of audiences and testing that visual design matches content themes. Once feedback has been collected, your web designers can evaluate the design and make any necessary changes long before the site is hosted live.
In addition to testing the visual design of your website for audience response to graphic elements and navigation, you should evaluate the design to see if it conforms to W3C accessibility rules. The World Wide Web Consortium W3C, develops interoperable technologies, specifications, guidelines, and software. Test your visual design for appropriate colour contrast, font size, ease of navigation, and operability.
DESIGN