An investigation of web-based hypermedia design support: methods and tools

Since the Internet networking was first established, the World Wide Web (or WWW) provides a new opportunity to deliver information and to communicate with others. Therefore, many organisations and industries have joined this exciting technology to take advantage of the Web. In recent years, the opportunity has arisen for other tasks to be carried out on the Web apart from delivering information. As the Web applications and documents have become larger and more complex, they have experienced many design and development problems which often lead to very high maintenance cost. To improve the quality of Websites and the structure of information, the designers need structured design methods, guidelines, and tools to assist their work. Some researchers have proposed hypermedia design methods and guidelines, which contain development cycle with formal design techniques to assist the construction of Web page designs. To overcome the design and development problems, this research is carried out by surveying currently available design methods. It shows the ways to apply these methods for developing structured Web sites. The results of this research led to identifying the design stages involved in developing Web sites using hypermedia methods. It also presents a CASE tool to provide a development environment for producing Web pages based on hypermedia design stages. This encourages Web designers to apply structured hypermedia design methods to improve the quality of design and to reduce the maintenance cost. The thesis is relevant for end-users, Web designers from organisations, institutes, and institutes for those who want to apply structured hypermedia design methods for producing their Web documents.