Understanding Interactive

When explaining to my grandfather what I do as an interactive advertiser, I'll typically use the analogy of building a house, since he's built many in his life, and there are many similarities between designing and building a house and designing and building a website.

First there are blueprints. Detailing what is going to be built to the exact inch and making sure everything is level. This in the interactive world is called User Experience Planning and Information Architecture and instead of blueprints they are called wire-frames and flow maps and is typically done in black and white.

Basically these two things, help designers understand how big to make certain things. For example making a 3 foot door frame would be impractical for most people, so User Experience people help guide designers on making decisions that will benefit the majority of users.

Once the blueprints or wire-frames and flow maps have been developed it's time to travel to the development site and pour the foundation. In the interactive world, when very good wire-frames have been developed, a back-end developer is able to work on the database and lay the foundation of the website at the same time the design is taking place.

The next step is design. This is what people understand the most, and where most designers go wrong as they try to skip the wire-frames phase. However, when design is based off of great wire-frames the design really pops, and your windows and doors are not only the right size, but they fit perfectly in place and look great for everyone.

Once the design is approved and the foundation has been laid it's time to start building. Here is where a front-end developer and a back-end developer work to build or code the site.

The back-end developer is typically like a plumber or an electrician where they are wiring up the house and making sure it's functional, to do this they use code like PHP, .NET, Java and SQL.

The front-end developer is the brick layer or carpenter making sure everything is structurally sound. They make sure that the design of the house is executed just as it has been designed. To do this they use code called XML, HTML, CSS, and Javascript. And just as it is very obvious when a brick layer or carpenter has cut corners, it is also very obvious when a front-end developer has cheated a little bit.

Once the site is built, and the pages or rooms have been built there's one more special step. While every room has been built to be customized on your website, there is one special room that has become to be standardized. That room is the Family Room and in interactive we call that Social Media.

Social Media is built on many platforms, like Facebook, YouTube, Linked In, Twitter, and Myspace. Each of these platforms has specific uses, and every house isn't complete without Social Media.

The reason for this, is that your house needs to become a home, and you want to let people know that they can stop by and visit every now and again. Without a good social media room developed, people that come to your site might not want to come back, or tell their friends that you have a cool house that is fun to go to and visit.

Having a good social media site, is like saying that your place is the go to place to watch the Super Bowl, because you have a big screen TV and can cook the best nachos and hot wings.

So there, your house is now complete. It's up and running, now make sure you continue to maintain it and keep it relevant. People can only talk about your awesome hot wings for so long.

Tags: Advertising, Architecture, Design, Development, Experience, IA, Information, Interactive, Media, Social, More…UX, User, Web-Design