Hour22.Organizing and Managing a Web Site

Hour 22. Organizing and Managing a Web Site

The first 21 hours of this book led you through the design and creation of your own web pages and the graphics to put on those pages. Now it's time to take a bigger-picture view of your work and stop thinking about individual web pages; it's time to start thinking about your web site as a whole.

This hour shows you how to organize and present multiple web pages so that people will be able to navigate among them without confusion. You'll also learn about ways to make your web site memorable enough to visit again and again. Web developers use the term "sticky" to describe pages that people don't want to leave. Hopefully this chapter will help you to make your web sites downright gooey!

Because web sites can be (and usually should be) updated frequently, creating pages that can be easily maintained is essential. This hour shows you how to add comments and other documentation to your pages so that youor anyone else on your staffcan understand and modify your pages.

Try It Yourself

By this point in the book, you should have enough HTML knowledge to produce most of your web site. You probably have made a number of pages already, and perhaps even published them online.

As you read this hour, think about how your pages are organized now and how you can improve that organization. Don't be surprised if you decide to do a redesign that involves changing almost all of your pagesthe results are likely to be well worth the effort!

Did you Know?

If you have been using a simple text editor such as Windows Notepad or Macintosh SimpleText to create your HTML pages, this is an excellent time to consider trying out an interactive web site development tool, such as Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver. Aside from helping you write HTML and CSS code quickly and intuitively, these programs offer time-saving ways to modify and keep track of many pages at once.

On the other side of the coin, these programs aren't free and are not absolutely necessary for managing a small- to medium-sized web site. Unless you plan to have at least 50 web pages on your site, or unless you were planning to buy a version of Microsoft Office that includes FrontPage anyway, you may save the most time and money by using the simple text editor and/or a shareware HTML editor, along with file transfer software you already know how to use.