 The process of creating a complex website should be accompanied at any time by a detailed plan to avoid certain difficulties. This plan should cover the following major areas. First of all, it should involve a team of skilled experts, and we will talk about the team and its composition first. Then it should contain the central goals and objectives that the site is going to pursue, and this is what we are going to talk about next. Goals and objectives. In this e-lecture, we will show that these two areas are closely connected. We want to make it clear that the development of websites is a complex enterprise involving manpower, time and costs necessary in the production of the site. So let's look at the composition of the team first. The team for the production of a website has to keep a balance between certain factors. It has to keep in mind the client's wishes concerning the website. It has to focus on the users of a website and their needs, but it has to be careful not to mix up client and user. The team has to have a precise idea about the technical possibilities of the internet, the eventual location of the website, and it has to be aware of the many factors of content management. Thus, the members of such a team should each have certain skills to cover all aspects of web publishing. Let us look at these team members in more detail. The following experts are part of a website production team. First of all, you need team members whose primary task is coordination. Website development certainly involves a group of programmers, and then of course you need a unit within your website team, a group of experts dealing with the content of the site. Since some of the responsibilities of these roles overlap, it is possible and in smaller teams even necessary that one member covers several fields of web development. In fact, this is the case in most of the teams which normally consist of 5 to 10 people. Let us look at these tasks in more detail. Coordinating a website team is very important, but at the same time it is extremely difficult. Legal issues, cost management and communication with the team members and among them belong to the central issues of team and project coordination. Furthermore, the project manager will have to put up a detailed schedule of whose turn it is in the process of the site development. Sometimes the order of events in such a schedule is pretty clear. For example, due to the fact that a graphic designer cannot illustrate content that has not yet been written. Let us look at an example from the virtual linguistics compass which may illustrate this. Now here you see a scene from our fieldwork classes, and as you may probably agree, a relatively complex website. Now here the content has to be organized first. For example, before the avatar for the speaker was designed it had to be clear who she is, how old she is and what she would say. So here clearly content influences design. Sometimes the workflow that is the fixing of who has to do what, when and for how long, is parallel. For example, when the multimedia designer has to work closely with the graphic designer to follow the guidelines of the overall site design. In our fieldwork class that you have just seen, all the colors and the entire graphic scheme has to be in accordance with the VLC color design. Coordination in advance can help to save money and time in the developmental process. So in summary, the project manager has to administer the following tasks. He or she should be involved in coordinating communication of all kinds, that is among team members, with team members, team to client and so on. Coordination means maintaining the schedule and it means assessing costs. In order to satisfy the customer's needs, the team needs a person who keeps permanent contact with the client concerning the content of the site or the service desired. The client representative preferably is a former member of the business or scientific community in which the website will operate. The development of the site itself requires the interplay of several individuals or groups. Certainly in complex team efforts there must be a group of programmers. They should have extensive knowledge of the techniques underlying the web and they should be experts in administrating databases, servers and application programming systems, database integration and application servers. As far as the technical development is concerned, specific technology researchers should investigate the appropriate technology of the site, such as databases, shopping technology, search engine placement and so on. And they should schedule data backups and handle security issues. The main portion of website development concerns its content. Thus one needs team members who plan, prepare and implement the content. So we need among others content developers and content writers and they are dealing with text primarily. We then need multimedia experts, that is graphics designers, sound engineers, illustrators and so on and so forth. And their task not only is development but also the selection of the appropriate tools. Recently the use of video has become an important flanking measure in web development. Modern websites are often supported by instructional videos. Websites that are dedicated to teaching can often hardly dispense with video material. Hence video production has become an extremely important issue within web development. And last but not least the website has to be tested, proof read and maintained. Thus there must be team members who are responsible for testing, maintenance and publishing. Some of the responsibilities of these roles overlap. It is possible that one member covers several fields of web publishing. In fact this is the case in most of the teams which normally consists of 5 to 10 people. Well and this applies to the virtual linguistics campus. I've been the project manager of the virtual linguistics campus a site with several hundred thousands of web elements since 2001. When the virtual linguistics campus was inaugurated. Since then we've had about 6 dozen team members recruited from our students who had successfully passed our web development classes. The team has always had between 10 and 15 members with clearly defined tasks. Project management, programming, graphics and multimedia design and of course content development. No one in our team is an expert in everything. For example I am very bad at design. The pictures you can see in all my e-lectures have all been designed by members of our graphics team but never by myself. But I am apart from doing project management part of the programming unit. I do a lot of audio engineering and of course I am involved in scientific authoring that is content development and research. And this applies to many of us. Our chief programmer Dr. Peter Franker is also highly involved in content development and linguistic authoring but like me he is not part of the design team. This has been our principle over the past 10 or more years. Clearly defined responsibility and a lot of team spirit. Well to plan a site and now we are returning to the goals of a website. You will also have to know what the site will be all about. This sounds fairly easy but there can be more difficulties than one might think. Several questions may help to set objectives for the site. And this also leaves marks on the process of developments. Here are some of these questions. Now probably the most important question is who and what is your site for? Is it for example for teaching? Does it support your teaching in class? Is it some sort of language technology application here illustrated by a picture on machine translation? Or do you use your site let's say for online learning? And then of course you have to answer the question what technical prerequisites do your users have? What sort of browser will they use? What sort of platform? Where will the website eventually be located? Further questions concern the kind of information and the kind of services the site will contain. For example if it is an internet shop or a presentational site this heavily influences its technical development. Depending on how thoroughly you want to answer these and other questions it requires a lot of manpower before you even start designing the site. A good way to avoid this is to put up rough objectives at first and then add more details as you go into the design process. So something like this you start off with a relatively rough idea and then you become more and more detailed as time passes by. But be sure that you have all the guidelines before the team starts developing content. Well this is not the whole story. Further aspects that have to be borne in mind concern the user for example. His or her motivations, the expectations and of course the perceptual prerequisites. And then last but not least it's of course the precise organization of the content that is an important issue. These and other aspects will be discussed in our e-lecture planning a website part 2. So see you there.