Creating Research-Based Web Sites with Netscape Composer

Site Mission Statement

You are probably familiar with a mission statement.  Many entities like corporations, charity organizations, or even UMW have such statements.  They help to define the purpose of the entity, who it serves, what its goals are, and how it plans to achieve those goals.  You can apply this process to your web site as well.  If you write a solid mission statement for your web site, you have a tool that you can use throughout the process of building your site.  The mission statement serves as one of the primary evaluation tools you have available to you that can help you determine if the site is successful.  Look back to the mission statement throughout the design process – it serves as a baseline for what you are trying to achieve.

Here is an example of a mission statement written for our web-based proposal:

“The mission of this web site is to provide my instructor with an overall view of my chosen topic, the quality and types of source materials available, and a broad vision of how this information will be presented through my research-based web site project.  The site will achieve these goals through several web pages that define the topic, the content categories, and a bibliography detailed with internet and non-internet sources.”

One other very valuable aspect of a mission statement – it can serve as a “contract” of sorts.  Since it states what the goals of the site are, it provides the basis for what content you include in the site, and what content you leave out.  If you are working to design a site for some entity, it is important to have an agreement on what the site includes and does not include before you begin building the pages.  If you do not have an agreement on what is to be included, you have no criteria on which to agree that the site is “complete.”