Design
The design phase of a site includes defining its purpose, its
target audience, the nature and type of content that will meet the
audience needs, and the applications that will be integrated into
the site. This analysis phase should result in a clear vision and
strategy, as well as giving an overall form and structure to the
site.
With these areas confirmed, creating
the visual design for a site is often an iterative process based on
created images, screenshots and mock-up pages. Designers using
specialist graphics tools may be used for this process. Once
agreement is reached on the general look and feel this has to be
translated into a framework or template into which content and
information can be added. Since the final output may be targeted at
a variety of platforms - web browsers, web TV, PDAs, and other
mobile devices - it is important to separate design from content
allowing content to be re-purposed for different "touch
points."
Immediacy allows designers to create
templates in any design or editing tool of their choice. The
designer can designate areas of the page as editable, and others as
non-editable by the insertion of simple XML tags at certain points
in the template. Typically, converting a standard page design into
an Immediacy template takes minutes. Any number of templates may be
used across a site and its sections. They provide a consistent look
and feel for a site, and allow subsequent editing to take place
without merging the content with the design.
Immediacy includes a number of
pre-built script components. Designers may augment these components
by writing their own and adding them to the system. Built in
components include menu functions, which support a variety of
expanding, drop down, and cascading menus. Any of these menus can
be selected for a site and configured to conform to its visual
design simply and quickly. After initial set-up, menus are
automatically updated by the content management system.
Immediacy also includes a powerful
style sheet editor. A site may use multiple templates, and any
template may support multiple style sheets. This combination
effectively separates content from presentation. Stylistic changes
may be made by switching between style sheets or editing inPidual
style rules. Switching templates completely replaces the visual
framework of the site without altering content. For example
changing from one template to another may cause re-ordering of the
component sections, hiding of sections that may exist in the
original template, and a complete change of the visual look and
feel.
A template is normally created as an
HTML file. Later addition of content to the editable areas is saved
separately as XML/XHTML. Immediacy supports framed and non-framed
sites.