Clarity’s Site Building Requirements

Site building is the process of creating the structure, framework, and overall user experience of a website. It is the necessary foundation for any successful web based solution. Leveraging information architecture and user experience (UX) principles, site building goes beyond design to ensure a cohesive, user-centric platform that is both functional and engaging.

Getting the website foundation right from the start facilitates future growth, scalability, and ongoing support for your business needs. This is especially crucial for a company like Clarity Vision Solutions, which operates in a dynamic industry and needs a website that can adapt to their evolving product lines, marketing strategies, and customer demands.

Leveraging Liferay’s agile site building features, Clarity can streamline iterative development through reusable page elements, templates, and flexible content management. This empowers them to build a seamless and engaging user experience quickly and efficiently, minimizing resource requirements.

Requirements

With this in mind, let’s consider Clarity’s specific site building requirements, such as key functionalities, content needs, and target audience considerations. The following site building requirements prioritize streamlining development processes, minimizing ongoing maintenance efforts, and ensuring a consistent website experience across all pages:

Reduce development time and cost by leveraging site and page templates for common website structures and functionalities

With reusable site and page templates, Clarity can provide a foundation for common website structures and functionalities. This simplifies repetitive tasks and streamlines development, ultimately reducing development costs and accelerating project timelines. Having a consistent foundation also helps ensure a cohesive user experience across all company sites and pages.

Define common layout elements in a master page to ensure consistency across all site pages

Liferay’s design system includes master pages for defining the overall page structure including headers, footers, navigation menus, and sidebars. This approach ensures a consistent user experience across all website pages while minimizing development and maintenance effort.

Accelerate page design with reusable, drag-and-drop page elements

Streamline content creation and updates with Liferay’s page fragments. Build custom content blocks like headers, footers, and CTAs, or leverage out-of-the-box elements for an efficient and flexible site building experience.

Ensure sites are accessible and usable by everyone

Accessibility is a core principle for an inclusive site design. This means creating websites that can be easily navigated and understood by everyone, regardless of their abilities. Liferay offers a robust platform with built-in accessibility features to help Clarity achieve this goal. Combined with best practices, Clarity can ensure a website that is accessible and user-friendly for everyone.

Simplify design implementation and maintenance for a consistent brand identity and user experience across sites

Liferay provides platform tools and extension points for defining CSS values, enabling Clarity to establish a centralized style guide that governs the website’s overall look and feel. Combined with master pages, fragments, and other design components, Clarity can implement a visually cohesive website, while minimizing the time and effort needed to ensure consistent user experience.

Implement a publishing workflow for site changes

Liferay offers features that facilitate collaboration between web developers, content creators, and other stakeholders involved in site building and management. This allows for streamlined content approval processes, version control, and efficient task management, all within the Liferay platform.

Conclusion

Now that we’ve explored Clarity’s site building requirements, we can use them to focus and guide our contributions to the Clarity website. In the next lesson, we’ll set up the version of the site we’ll use throughout the following exercises.

Next Up: Setting Up Clarity’s Site