Developing a Website....HELP

Hey guys,

I just had a few questions for you. I hope I am posting this in the right forum. Granted, this is a certification related forum, I'm sure someone can point me the right direction.

I have been tasked at my work to aid upper-management in getting a facility website up and running. We are a specialty hospital want to get our site up and running.

Now, we will hire a professional company to make this happen for us BUT we think we would like to have a better idea of what we want and then go to a firm as opposed to letting them dictate to us "what we want".

Are there any best practices/resources out there I can use to possibly come up with templates/designs of our potential website?

I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts. I appreciate your help guys and gals!

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Comments

dynamik

What's the scale? 5 pages? Services, contact, about us, etc.? 100s of pages?

What type of functionality to you want it to have? Static information or dynamic database-driven content?

What's your budget?

There are too many "best practices" to list. Search engine optimization, accessibility, browser compatibility, etc.

Can you give me a better idea of what you're looking for?

cgrimaldo

dynamik wrote:

What's the scale? 5 pages? Services, contact, about us, etc.? 100s of pages?

What type of functionality to you want it to have? Static information or dynamic database-driven content?

What's your budget?

There are too many "best practices" to list. Search engine optimization, accessibility, browser compatibility, etc.

Can you give me a better idea of what you're looking for?

I'm sorry, I could have been more specific with my post.

It's for a hospital. We'd like to keep it between 5-10 pages. We'd prefer not to have a potential patient have to sift through tons of pages looking for info.

We would like to list our services, contact info, about us, patient information, possibly include some basic forms they can download and print before their visit. It would be pretty static information.

There would possibly be a link to a payer website we will use to allow patients to pay their bills but that's about it.

Daniel333

I am assuming there will be secured information on the site? Really, 5 pages of static content anyone can do.

What are going to be your challenges?

cgrimaldo

Something like this would be ideal:

http://www.oklahomaspine.com/index.php

Grynder

It seems the site will be pretty static. Using Joombla will cover what you need, plus they have tons of designs to choose from that are easily modified.

ally_uk

Hi there I have recently began experimenting with webdesign and have decided to go the Open Source Route to develop to keep the cost down.

The following tools are what I use to get the job done

Gimp http://www.gimp.org/ - I use this to crop pictures and to improve quality of images

Inkscape http://www.inkscape.org/ - The second stage is to develop the page layout and I also desgin graphics i.e menus, banners, logos in Inkscape.

Kompozer - http://www.kompozer.net/ - Final stage after the design is complete is to actually put the site together I would say learn basic HTML and CSS especially CSS as this will save you a hell of alot of time when making changes to existent Pages and is a good way of keeping your pages consistent.

It's not hard to do a afternoons experimentation with CSS and I had a site up and running all I had to do is Host it.

Of course if you want to take things further at a later stage you could decide to learn stuff like Javascript, Flash, PHP.

For now though I am working my way through the basics but I would recommend you check out the Open Source programs as they get the job done are fairly straight forward to use and the good thing is they are cross platform woohoo.

If you want to download a tester version then go to http://portableapps.com/ this site contains images of programs which don't need to be installed handy if you have a USB key

dynamik

I tried Kompozer the other day because I'm trying to get away from Dreamweaver, and it absolutely destroyed my PHP code and moved everything around. I probably would have suffered less damage by using an old version of Front Page. Use Notepad++ unless you need WYSIWYG.

cgrimaldo

Thanks for the input everyone! I'll take a look at some of those links here this weekend.

Dynamik, expect a pm from me soon...