UCSF School of Pharmacy

Step 2: Determine your goals

Ask your supervisor and the users of your Web site how it can be improved. Some examples of questions you can ask are:

1. When you come to our site, what information are you most frequently looking for? (If yours is an existing site, you can partly determine this on your own by viewing the Web site statistics.)
2. Choose a common task of finding information on our site. How many seconds does it take you to find what you need? Is that length of time satisfactory?
3. What helpful information is missing from our site?
4. What information is outdated or no longer needed?
5. Is the information you need grouped and structured the way you expect?
6. Do the labels we choose for our links make sense?

A more valuable way to gather feedback is to perform usability testing: observing how people use your site. Usability testing can provide surprising results. It is most useful when repeated iteratively before, during, and after the development process.

If a large project is required, work with your supervisor to determine a project outline, requirements specification, and calendar.

Go To: Step 3: Review our minimum skill requirements or Web Developer's Guide