A Methodology for the Design of WWW Sites and its Application to Distance Education

Providing information about organizations on the WWW is becoming more and more widespread and important. Such information is usually provided focusing on the construction of single Web pages, linking them as need arises. In the present paper, we advocate the need for a systematic design of the structure and of the interaction patterns with a Web site. We propose a methodology for the conceptual and detailed design of a Web site and we illustrate our methodology with the design of a site for distance education. The methodology is based on the entity relationship model for representing the contents of the site and a Workflow conceptual model for representing interactions of different types of users of the site. Detailed design is based on extensions of hypermedia design techniques and allows semi-automatic derivation of the structure of the Web pages from the conceptual schemas