I remember how proud I was when I designed my first site.
I worked so hard to design the graphics, write the articles,
grow my traffic. It eventually grew to around 100 pages. Not
huge by any stretch of the imagination, but decent size for
a site with mainly original content.
I also remember very well the day I decided to change the
design and add some new sections...and the days and nights
of what seemed like an endless nightmare that followed when
I had to manually go in and add the new code for graphics
and navigation to all those pages.
You see, being fairly new to site design, I jumped in with
both feet and just started building. There was not a lot of
real "planning"; my main concern was the here and now -
getting the site up and running ASAP.
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If you're just starting to build your site, it's worth
investing a little time now in planning and discovering
a few of the "tricks" and tools that can be employed
to save you a lot of hard work (and headaches) later.
USE TEMPLATES
One of the easiest time-saving tools to use, templates are
simply "patterns" for your site pages.
Several of the popular HTML/WYSIWYG editors allow you to
make and save templates. If you write your own code, as I
do, simply design and save a document that contains the
"skeleton" of your pages so all you have to do when adding
new content is type it in, change the page title and the
META "description" and "keywords" tags, and you're good
to go.
In addition to making your job as a webmaster a heck of a
lot easier, templates allow you to maintain a consistent
look and feel throughout your site - which is perceived by
many visitors as being more user-friendly.
USE SSI
If you ask me, SSI is the best thing since triple chocolate
cheesecake.
SSI stands for "Server Side Include", an HTML comment line
that contains a command/directive. It allows you to
dynamically generate web pages - in other words, your
documents are created "on the fly".
There are many uses for SSI. One of them is that it can
make maintaining and updating your site's navigation a snap
by taking advantage of the "INCLUDE" directive. Basically,
this allows you to insert one document inside another.
Let's say you create a file called "navigation.htm" that
contains the images and links for your site's navigation.
If you add this snip of code:
<!--#include file="navigation.htm"-->
to your "index.shtml"
document, the contents of "navigation.htm" will be inserted
where the include tagline is located within "index.shtml".
In this case, when "index.shtml" is generated, it '
will contain your navigation scheme in the spot you
placed the include tagline.
The beauty of this is that when you change your site
navigation structure you only have to change *one document*
(navigation.htm) as opposed to manually changing *every
page* in your site.
For more information on SSI, visit the Web Developer's Virtual Library
and consult your hosting provider to find out if SSI is included in your package and how to implement it.
LEAVE ROOM FOR ADS
Even if you're just starting out and don't plan on including
advertising on your site, it's wise to design the site in
such a way that adding banners, buttons, etc. will be
possible should you decide to do so.
If you use fixed widths in your tables - and we don't want
to open up the absolute v. relative width debate here -
make sure your main section can accommodate a 468x60
banner.
You'll also want to be sure to actually leave a place to
put the banners or buttons, whether it be vertically along
the left or right side, horizontally across the top or
bottom, or some combination of both.
At this point in time, advertising banners may not be a
concern. However, if your site grows enough to support
paid advertising and/or if you decide to promote affiliate
programs using banners or buttons, it's nice if you can
implement those options without a lot of hassle.
ALWAYS PLAN AHEAD!
I know it's easy to get so consumed with finishing your
site and going live that you think you don't have time to
devote to extensive planning.
If you want to save yourself a lot of time and trouble in
the long run, though, it's best to keep the future in mind
when developing your site. After all, when you hit it big,
you want to be able to sit back for a few moments and enjoy
your success - and build on it - rather than stressing out
over what you should have done initially and be forced to
go back to the drawing board.
