Now that we’ve defined the problem for the redesign of this site and summarized the solution to the problem, it’s time to build out and implement that solution.

The first part of implementation is the content. The appearance is important, but content is critical. If your viewers don’t find what they’re looking for, and quickly, they won’t stick around to hunt for it.

This aspect of website construction is called “Information Architecture.” Information architecture is the structure of your website, and how you get from one piece of information to another. This includes the content itself, how you chunk out the content for display, what each chunk (generally, though not always, a page or section) is labelled, and how you reach each chunk from any other chunk.

For this site, first we’ll be looking at the types of information that I need to include in the site. Keeping in mind that the purpose of the site is to meet the design needs of potential contract clients and potential employers by selling my design-related problem solving skills to them, I need to focus on what information they need up front and how that information can best persuade them that I’m the right answer to their problem.

The obvious thing is that they need to be able to contact me. So I need to include some way to reach me. I want to make it easy for people to contact me quickly, because if there are any barriers to that contact, I drastically reduce the number who will follow through and actually contact me. One barrier that you absolutely must take into account is personal bias against certain forms of communication. Some people hate making calls on the phone. Some people can’t stand email, etc. So the best way to deal with contact information is to provide several different avenues of communication. Balancing this is the recognition that this is a personal site and therefore the phone number is my personal number; the address is also my family’s address. There are certain ways around this, such as opening a PO box or buying a second line just for business, but that may not always be practical (for instance, you can’t take deliveries at a PO address so if you plan to do that regularly, you’ll need a physical address). It’s best to discuss which methods to use with anyone attached to that information.

Next up, viewers need to see what I can do, and proof that I can do what I say I can do. This is best shown by breaking it up into discrete units. One easy division is to list what I can do in one section, and what I have already done, in another. “What I have done” is still a pretty big chunk of information. After all, I’ve been at it for a couple decades, all told. So I’m going to divide “What I have done” into the traditional resume and portfolio — the resume is a relatively brief text gloss of the high points, where a portfolio becomes the proof that I have experience doing what I say I can do.

This is still a pretty big blob of information and alone does not show that I can necessarily do all the things I say I can. After all, you can’t tell from a screenshot in a portfolio how a site resizes or how it looks on a mobile device (for instance). So there needs to be something more. One way that suggests itself is to create walk-throughs that follow my work on individual projects (like the article you’re reading right now). I could write opinion pieces on certain aspects of design. I can start providing links to my personal experiments, where I’m the only person doing any work on them so you know that whatever you’re seeing there was actually done by me and me alone. A series of articles on these topics suggests something in either a blog or library format. Given that opinion pieces and experiments are usually more timely than strict articles, I’m currently leaning toward blog format. Regardless, for now we’ll call it “articles of proof.”

It’s usually a good idea to let people know a bit about you if you want to do business with them. This is true whether you’re a large company or an individual contractor. No one cares what you had for breakfast yesterday, but they want to have some idea what you’ll be like to work with. You have to make them feel like they can trust you, and that you will mesh well with them if they ever have to contact you directly. That last is more important for a site like this one than, say, an ecommerce site, but it’s still important to make your consumers feel that if they have to contact customer support they’ll be valued and they can trust your support people and talk to them easily. Failure to do so can be a major barrier to making a sale. The opinion articles I mentioned above can contribute to this. I will also include links to many of the major social networking sites so people can get a sense of me in a less formal way; these double as alternate contact methods. I’ll have to include some basic autobiographical information as it pertains to the services I’m offering, either as an about page or an about blurb.

Last, there are a few constructions that pertain to the site itself. Decisions need to be made about what information to show on the home page. There needs to be navigation to all the chunks of information that result from the above, and for most sites, you’ll want to include a sitemap, which spells out all the information available on the site with links to every page/section. Sitemaps provide users with a quick way to get anywhere in your site, and they’re also useful for search engine optimization.

To sum up:

• Contact methods, several different avenues. Balance my family’s privacy against my business interests when choosing exact methods.
• What I can do: services I am offering
• Text gloss of what I have done, in the form of a resume
• Proof that I can do what I say I can do because I’ve done it before, a portfolio of previous work
• Articles of proof to show that I continue to do what I say I can do, and to show it by explaining how to do it
• Information about myself so that potential clients are comfortable contacting me
• Links to social networking sites and “about” information as pertains to working with me
• Homepage content decisions
• Navigation
• Sitemap

Starting with the next entry, we’ll look at each of these sections in depth.