Web Site Planning

Like most things, building a web site will be much easier if you plan ahead. To just start off building and adding without a plan usually means redeveloping your entire site as its current structure grows unwieldy. If you're smart, a little extra work in the beginning will save you a lot of work in the end. Follow this 3 step plan and you'll be off to a great start.

» Step 1

Think about all the things you want your site to have and seperate them into specific content related categories. For example, if your site were to have Recipes, Kitchen Hints, Family Photos and Family Personal pages; the Recipes and Kitchen Hints would fall into one category and the Family items would fall into another category. From these categories you'll build a basic structure for your site. Jot down all the categories you plan to have.

» Step 2

After jotting down your categories draw a simple diagram of the layout. It will help you organize your site structure. Using the sample family site outlined above, I've drawn an example site plan:

As you can see in the chart the Index Page has links to the Jumpstation level pages, which are the Food Links and Family Links category pages. Think of jumpstations as categorized links page into your topic-specific content. The Jumpstation level pages are linked back to the Index Page, to each other and downward to the individual content pages relative to that jumpstation. As you add new pages, you only need to add a link to the new page from it's respective jumpstation category. Brilliant!

In addition to the links from a jumpstation to its content pages, you can optionally link between the pages of a particular category, as indicated by the red lines on the bottom of the chart. I wouldn't put a link to every page in a certain category on every page within that category or you're defeating the purpose of the jumpstation. Just have a "next page" link if you do it, and when you add a new page of content you only need to update the last page in the chain with the "next page" link.

» Step 3

To make your site easy to develop and be consistent it helps to make a basic template before starting. With a template you can just add the content and not have to continually code whole pages.

For this site my template has all the basic html commands a document needs, the basic three-column structure, then the SSI code to insert the header, footer, and the left and right-hand columns. To make a new page I just fill in the stuff in the middle and save it under a new name. When I want to change the look or change footer, or center or right-hand columns, I only have to update one file for each to have that change reflected on my whole site. Instructions for using SSI are in my members-only site. [ Learn More ]

Your navigation structure can make or break your site. Most of my pages have the same navigation structure. Furthermore, most of my sites are set up the same way as well. Each page has the links to the Home page and to all the Jumpstations. You can go from one area of my site to a completely different area with one click from any page. Now that's navigating made easy! If you're welcoming contact from your visitors then include your contact link on each page.

That's it. Follow this plan and you'll have a site that's easy to grow and develop and your guests will enjoy the thought you've put into it. Man, how did you get so smart?