| There are pages, and then there are sites ”groups of pages linked together. (The term Web site is also used to refer to the server on which those pages are published.) Without carefully created links and targets, a set of Web pages is no site ”it's just a bunch of individual, unrelated pages. Link those pages in just the right way, and they become a cohesive site your visitors can explore to enjoy all that's offered on every page. In this chapter, you'll revisit the various ways a Web site can be structured (first introduced in Chapter 17, "Understanding Web Authoring") and learn how and when to deploy each method in your own projects.  This chapter assumes that you have already installed Netscape Communicator 4.7 and its built-in Web-authoring program, Composer. If you have not, visit http://wp.netscape.com/download/archive.html and download Netscape Communicator version 4.7 for your system. (It's free.) More recent versions of Netscape and Composer are available, as well. Although the exact steps for some features may differ slightly, you'll have little difficulty finding your way around a newer version of Composer using the material in this book. |  What separates basic Web authoring tools like Composer from big leaguers like Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver? Well, other than a few bells and whistles, the most important difference is that pro tools include site-management features. With site management, you can display a diagram of all the interlinked pages in a Web site. You can add or delete pages or move pages around, and all the links among pages are automatically adjusted so that they still lead where they're supposed to. You can apply a theme to a Web site so that all its pages share a common style. Starting out, creating single pages and basic Web sites of maybe five pages or so, you don't need site-management capabilities. But as you move up to bigger, more complex sites, you should start hinting that, for your next birthday, you want a Web authoring program with site management. | |
