Web consulting

Problem: “I'm just getting started and not sure what to do”

Solution: You’ve got a new small business, venture, idea, and you want to share it with the world but don’t know where to start. I can help you determine the best domain name, and get you set up with the right kind of web hosting. I’ll help you determine the goals of your website. What exactly do you want it to do for you and for your visitors? Together we’ll determine how your site should be organized (known as information architecture) and arrive at a navigation scheme that’ll lead your visitors on an enjoyable ride through your site.

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Information Architecture Tutorial

Overview
by John Shiple
John Shiple is the leader of Squishy Designs, an Internet consulting company in Venice, California, specializing in information architecture, collaborative system strategies, and advanced user interfaces for Internet-based content. He also helped found Bigstep.com.

Information architecture is the science of figuring out what you want your site to do and then constructing a blueprint before you dive in and put the thing together. It's more important than you might think, and John Shiple, aka Squishy, tells you why.

Squishy first looks at how to define your site's goals, shedding light on the all-important art of collecting clients' or co-workers' opinions and assembling them in a coherent, weighted order of importance. He also shares his scheme for documenting everything so that all parties can keep up. The next step is figuring out who the heck your audiences are going to be. Once that's out of the way, you can start organizing your future site into pages of content and functions that the site will need to have.

Next, Squishy gets into creativityland, where you start to build the beast: form a skeleton, pick your metaphors, map out your navigation. Then it's time to break out the graphics program, come up with layout grids, design sketches, and mock-ups, and get ready to build!

Get started: Lesson 1»

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