Web Planning

 Web Planning is a  special aspect of web development because it is when many decisions are made that affect the design, implementation, and later promotion of a a web.

Principles of Web Planning

Based  on the Web's media characteristics and qualities, principles of web planning can be derived that guide the developer in understanding the limits of and defining a focus for planning. Unlike other forms of media, the Web's dynamic nature tends to make planning an ongoing, continuuos process in which issues of multiple authorship and rapidly changing informationrelationship come into play.

The Limits of Web Planning: What a Developer Can't Control

In Developing a web and making it available to the public to freely browse, a developer has no control over a range of factors. The first step of the planning process is to recognize these factors and consider how they may limit planning for a particular web. The factors over which a developer has no control include user behavior and browser display.

 User Behavior

Because the Web is a dynamic, competitive system based on user choices and selectivity, a web developer can't control how any particular user is going to access and use a web's information. The Web's porous quality, in particular, means that a user need not enter a web's from a designated home page, but from any arbitrary page. Although a developer's intent may be to guide a user down a series of pages, actual use may differ. Access to a web follows more the pin cushion model, where users might enter at any given point, and thus a web has no true top. Users might enter a web at any arbitrary link.

On a larger scale, the entire Web itself, composed of millions of individual webs, resembles a cloud of hypertext. Users in the cloud model don't even necessarily experience a single web, but move from page to page in Web space, through navigation techniques such as tree, spider, or space-oriented searching. In particular, when a user enters a web as a result of a spider keyword search, the web pages that match the search pattern may lead a user deep inside what the web developer might consider the introductory or welcome pages of a web.

The Web's porous quality is a consideration during planning as well as in the other processes of development: analysis, design, implementation, and promotion. During the planning stage, it is possible to intend to build a web with a different entry pattern than the pin cushion model. In fact, it is often possible to shape general user behavior toward a wine bottle model by using navigational cues, web developers can do is identify what general model of user behavior to aim for. Although user behavior can't be controlled, a statement of the planned general user access model can serve as a guide for later processes of web development, particularly design.

The User's Browser and Display

As described, the client/server organization of the Web allows for a wide variety of browsers to be available to users. A web planner can't know what kind of browsers that users will have. Moreover,  new browsers are in development, and future browsers are certain to provide more and different features than the ones presently available. Therefore, different users, based on their browser's operation, will experience a web differently, but share common navigational needs. 

Some users may perceive a web using a text-only browser, whereas others may use the most current graphical browser that supports extensions to HTML. Therefore, in planning a web, developers need to consider what information will be essential so that it's not lost to users who have text-only browsers or browsers that don't support HTML extensions. For example, if developers place important or essential information in a graphics file, some users may never see it, because not all Web browsers support graphics. The choices for planners in addressing user browser display include a series of choices that may limit information available to some users. Planners choose where essential infromation can be placed.