The Benefits of Building a Web Site
What Drives People to the Web
What kinds of services, you may be wondering, are people looking for on the Internet? Eight or nine years ago, the Internet was largely a research medium, meaning that people would hit the Internet to try to find information about something fairly academic or obscure. This is not surprising, given that universities were the first groups to start putting their content online.
Today, the number of reasons people head to the Internet has grown dramatically and includes the following:
To research, compare, and purchase products To find and interact with other people (business colleagues, friends, romantic interests) To get daily news and information delivered in real time To search for and find information about any topic or organization of interest To deliver and promote their own messages and products to others on the Web To watch or listen to events, online and otherwise, delivered in a variety of audio and video formats To educate themselves via online classes and enrollment in universities To play games and entertain themselves - To complete all sorts of personal and professional tasks that can now be done securely online, such as online banking, personal finance, investing, tax submission, travel, donating, and procurement
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These items run the gamut of professional and personal, and they cross demographic lines. What is common among most online users, though, is that they begin their online usage with a focused purpose, and that focus then bleeds over into surfing for things that interest them throughout the Web.
Choosing the Right Type of Web Site
For all its diversity in content, the Internet really doesn’t have that many different types of Web sites. Why do so many Web sites look alike? The main reason is that people want their sites to be easy to use, free (or close to it), and similar to other sites they’ve seen or experienced. This has resulted in the emergence of some standard types of Web sites. A number of components for these sites can be found in ColdFusion. Where applicable, we’ve noted it in the following list. The most common types of sites include
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The Product Site: The most common type of site. Generally, the site offers some basic information about a company, its products, staff members, perhaps a product demo, and a way to contact the organization to get more information. Examples of this kind of site would be www.symantec.com, www.amf.com, and www.nadelectronics.com.
The Commerce Site: A storefront on the Internet. Whether it’s a single company that carries just its own specialized products or a retailer that sells a wide array of products, these sites are geared toward selling products and offering accessories to complement those products. An example of this kind of site is www.macys.com. ColdFusion offers tools that can help you add a shopping cart, a search function, and more to your site easily.
The Portal Site: A site that aggregates content from a wide variety of sources. Portal sites tend to be rich in content and links but short on graphics. The idea is to provide users with a launching pad to other
destinations on the Internet, though in recent years, many of these
portals are adding features to try to keep their users on their own site. An example of this kind of site is www.yahoo.com. ColdFusion includes robust search capabilities that enable you to have more content-rich sites that are easily indexed and searched.
The News Site: A site that, in general, mirrors an offline counterpart, such as ABC News. These sites provide a lot of the same information as their offline counterparts through the use of text, video, audio, and graphics, and also provide services geared toward the online audience, such as chat sessions, newsletters, and personalized content. An example of this kind of site is www.cnn.com. ColdFusion includes tools for adding chat to your site as well.
The Application Site: A type of site that offers perhaps the greatest diversity of all the sites. Application sites are geared toward a specific purpose, such as banking, investing, automobile purchasing, travel planning, photo galleries, event planning, or online greetings. Some of the commonalities among these sites include user accounts, password protection, and the widespread use of e-mail campaigns to try to keep users coming back. Examples of this kind of site include www.egreetings.com, www.
imotors.com, and www.bankofamerica.com.
- The Personal Site: Personal sites also offer a great deal of variety in their design and function. Personal sites usually include some of the designer’s work, opinions, and rants; links to other sites; and pictures. Examples of this kind of site are
www.loungeboy.com and www.katswindow.net.
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Macromedia Studio 8: Your Ally in Development
After you’ve answered a number of the questions in the “Finding Your Place on the Web” section, you may be wondering how you’re going to build your grand Web site. Well, don’t fret. With Macromedia Studio, you have the most complete, user-friendly, and popular development suite on the market. Even though professionals use these products all the time, the programs in the Macromedia Studio suite are truly designed to empower the first-time Web developer. With an array of tutorials, wizards, and interfaces that keep you as distant from the code as you want to be, Macromedia Studio makes the Herculean task of building powerful Web applications seem like just another project.
The goal with Macromedia Studio is to help you, the developer, build
compelling and powerful Web sites in the shortest amount of time, while simultaneously helping you alleviate cost and resource issues common to Web development. Macromedia Studio includes several tools to help make this happen:
Dreamweaver 8: The premier tool for easily building Web pages. You can use Dreamweaver to generate and edit ColdFusion code, which makes developing dynamic Web applications much easier.
Fireworks 8: A leading tool for the graphical development of a site. Fireworks helps you design the look and feel of your site, as well as
prepare the graphics for inclusion in an HTML or CFML file.
Flash 8: The world’s most popular tool for adding animation and sound to Web sites. Flash will truly change the way any site works.
- Contribute 3: Collaborate with others and take all the development hassle out of building (and maintaining) Web sites with Contribute. Using this tool in combination with Dreamweaver will help you design Web sites in such a way that just about anyone in your organization who can use a word processing program will be able to add and modify content on the site.
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This book includes information about two other Macromedia products you may want to use in developing your site. Formerly part of the Studio suite, they remain powerful tools for performing specialized site-building tasks:
Created: March 27, 2003
Revised: April 3, 2006
URL: http://webreference.com/graphics/studio8/1
