It’s end of Week 3 and some more homework submitted. Yesterday in class, we discussed previous homework’s and the importance of quantitative data the will you, as a web designer/developer would use to measure your progress toward the “Smart” goal. As Adam pointed, it may not matter that much if  it’s your own website, but it does with a client. Where I am concerned, I always presumed this would be a definite time-line. You I did put some thought in it and yes quantitative goals such as”40 people to fill request form” or say, “A certain now of hits or views on a specific page in the website” could classify as quantitative data and you would need to define or help the client focus on these quantitative goals rather than just time-line.

This week was drawing some navigational site diagrams and charting out the functional requirements of the website work flow. A navigational site-map outlines the flow that a user might take in navigating through your website. I had fun playing with the newest trial version of Microsoft Visio. I have used it before but the current version always makes it easier and I figured there’s no better time to try it than now 🙂 I looked up http://webstyleguide.com/wsg3/3-information-architecture/4-presenting-information.html for more information – a helpful article.

The other document was the Functional Requirements/Feature Plan document. The idea of developing this one is that another web professional who could understand the needs well enough to build the functionality with almost no additional information. I did get down to some detail on this one and yes, took a lot of my time. On the positive side, it resolved a few issues. It gave me an idea how the site map and requirements go hand in hand. Also I now knew how many pages I really had in the website and how the web pages linked to one another. I also chalked out some wireframe diagrams  on what I really needed constant on the template,  in terms of content on each page.

Here are a few other links I have been reading:

http://blog.craigslist.org/ ( Craigslist CEO blog….interesting!)

http://online-social-networking.com/ (An interesting approach on social media)