By Marcia Gulesian
Most comapnies want to deploy Web pages that fulfill a business purpose. Their goal might be selling their product (at a profit!), distributing information (such as newly legislated prerequisites for obtaining a driver license), gathering information (such as the demographics of potential customers) from an on-line form that doesn't turn people away because it's too complicated or intrusive, etc.
This article illustrates some of the ways IT and business professionals can work together in the design of a Web site to achieve these goals in an efficient and well thought out manner. It presumes the reader has a basic knowledge of statistics, Web site design (e.g., at least HTML, JavaScript and cookies) and spreadsheets (e.g., Microsoft Excel). However, the "Reference" section includes a number of resources covering these topics for anyone seeking a review or further information.
The question is what do you put on your page(s) to achieve your goal(s)? You could decide on your own or together with a team of in-house experts and hope for the best. Or you could throw the process of Website design open to the world of users beyond your firewall. In doing so, you would be democratizing the process by letting the public tell you, through their actual behavior, which of a number of possible designs gets them to use your Web page(s) in the way that you had hoped they would. As pointed out in a recent New York Times article, the latter approach has now become main stream.
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