The objective of this paper was to present our WISDOM method that: guides the designer through the website design process, proposes design solutions based on already existing solutions for online website design, facilitates the choice of software components to implement specific services, and speeds up website construction.
This method relies on the state-of-the-art strengths in the website design process, modeling dimensions, Model-Driven Engineering and the patterns approach. It proposes a website analysis catalog and a software component analysis catalog. The originality of our method is that it links the design process to formalized experience and a software component characterization that allows both functional and non-functional aspects to be considered. Our analysis of the method’s use highlights that formalizing the steps of the design process helps designers, especially novice designers, to design a website. Since the catalogs formalize the analysis of online websites and user experience, they provide consistent advice. At the technical level, we propose a design tool that has a class framework to guide the design process and to facilitate efficient code generation. Our analysis of the tool’s use highlights its efficiency for rapid website development and its use of the “website family” concept. The results are very encouraging for both method and tool; both facilitate website design by reusing existing solutions and components. However, our analysis also underlines a few limitations in terms of usability and support, and thus we need to improve both the method and the tool in order to more rigorously quantify the advantages that they provide using a metric that has to be defined.