Process

	All creative endeavers involve the same development process. It is an evolutionary cycle of thinking about the project, working on it, thinking about it some more, refining the work, analyzing, organizing, and modifying until eventually the project is published. At this point, information changes or a better way of doing something is discovered. After more planning, modifications are made and the project is published again. This cycle repeats itself often on the Web. Planning The process begins with a series of questions. What is the purpose? Who is the audience? What is the content? What is the order or structure of the content? What is the concept and style? What is the navigational structure? What are the technical specifications? What elements, devices, and tools will be used? What is the budget? What are the deadlines? Who will do the work? Producing There are many ways to make a web page.Simple pages can be created in a word processor. Existing documents can be converted into HTML documents. Web editors such as PageMill, HomePage, Front Page or Netscape Composer can be used to assemble text and graphics and other elements onto a page. Simple pages can be developed by an individual. Complex projects may require a team approach. Each of the elements including text, graphics, multimedia elements such as sound, animation, or movies, and the programming of Javascripts or CGI scripts may be assigned to separate people. Publishing Once a page is completed, the HTML document and its associated graphics need to be placed on a website host computer. This computer may be your own or someone else's. You may have to pay for the space or it might be provided for free. If you want the world to find your web page, then you'll need to register your site with the web indexing and search engine companies such as Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite, InfoSeek and Lycos. Maintaining These days information gets out of date quickly. Fortunately, web pages can be easily modified and updated. Someone should regularly check pages to see if the links still work and the information is still accurate. Tools are now available which automatically check for broken links. Also, site management tools can make global changes on all the pages throughout a site. Pages can even be updated dynamically from information stored in a database. Change the database and every page which uses that information is changed automatically.

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