Réseau Pharmaceutique Œcuménique (EPN)

According to EPN's membership guidelines, a partner is an organization, agency or association that provides financial or technical support or undertakes collaborative activities with the Network, or is an umbrella organization of which the Network is a member. EPN's partners include:

Download the website resources document [.doc 39KB] [.pdf 28KB].

1 Resources for website design and good web practice

Sustainable Development Communications Network: SD Webworks

http://www.sdcn.org/webworks/

Covers all aspects of web projects for NGOs. Metadata is covered under menu 'Creating Web Style Guides and Product Specifications'. Also see under the 'Managing Content and Workflow' menu for outsourcing and newsletters, and the useful 'Managing Web Site Redesigns'.

As the EPN staff and design team went through the website specification process workshop, we developed a specification document (or design document) that captured what we had decided along the way.

You can download our documentation to see for yourselves how we arrived at the design for the EPN website.

• EPN website specification document [.doc 100KB] [.pdf 54K

3 Identify content and functional requirements

Now that it has been established what the site is going to be about and who it is for, it is time to pinpoint what it will contain. The aim of this part of the information architecture process is to gather the pieces for creating the structure and organization of the site.

There are two key questions:

• What pieces of content does the site need?
• What sorts of functionality will be required?

In order to harness all the ideas about how the site will work, create a list of the content and functional requirements. Then reach a consensus on how this content will be grouped and labelled. A side effect of this process is to create a content list or inventory, which is the basis for the site structure.

2 The audience

Start by listing the intended audiences. Then list all the needs and goals of the different audiences. Have everyone rank the importance of each need and goal for each audience.

2.1 Create scenarios for audiences/users

Scenarios are stories. They tell the tales of users experiencing the site, and they help you and your collaborators visualize the site and its users. Scenarios are also useful in validating the site’s design once it is finished: If the scenarios match up with the actual design of the site, you did something right.

Using the previous definitions of your audience, try to come up with a set of users who represent the majority of visitors. The size of the site and audience determine how many users you will write scenarios for. Usually three to six scenarios are sufficient.