I think that when most people visit a website they form an opinion as to whether or not they will continue to stay on the site within the first several seconds of visitation. My navigation elements for the site will need to be well thought out so that when people do visit they are easily guided deeper into the site. At the top level navigation, I’ve thought of the key areas I want people to come to my site for.
- About Me -biography, resume, aspirations, work experience,
- My Blog – discussions about various topics from web development to philosophy
- My Services – this will include tutoring, consulting, & any certification services
- Shop – various products I will sell to people that I have created or am re-selling
- Contact – social media, email, phone.
I plan on having this as a top menu bar, in addition to incorporating links to these areas with visual hyperlinks as my visitors to the site scroll down the home page. This setup will be my universal setup for how I will build and store information on my website. Difficulties may arise as I begin to format the My Services page because it will likely need to be connected to the Shop page. Having the ability to connect a shopping cart to services I can provide on that page will entice and encourage people to take up what services I can provide.
Next step I will need to take is formatting each navigation item with the appropriate sub-pages. This will be done step-by-step using an Agile project management based method.
I’m going to create some sticky notes and itemize what needs to be done in order to build my site. Unless I find a good way to do this digitally I may wind up just using post-it notes and uploading pictures for supporting documentation.
For additional insight, I found this video helpful for understanding how CSS code can help make navigation menus pop. Lightbulbs are going off. I may wind up learning how to use CSS code to format.
More coming soon.