GETTING STARTED> Purpose : Audience : Content : Image : Planning

Planning

Run the site, don't let it run you!

Hopefully by now, you've made the lists I suggested - purpose, audience, content & look. You've checked out loads of other sites, noted what you like and don't like about them. You're developing a really clear plan of what you want your site to be. If you're a visual person, the next step is to draw a site map, storyboard or flowchart. Basically, a diagram that shows what you want the site to contain, and how you want to be able to navigate around the site. Now you know what you want, let's make sure you get there.

I will say this twice, because it is THE most important thing I can possibly tell you about web-design:

DIRECTORY STRUCTURE IS REALLY IMPORTANT
DIRECTORY STRUCTURE IS REALLY IMPORTANT

If you've already started building your site in an unstructured way, I know it's really tempting just to leave it as it is and try to fix any problems, but here I have to insist: NO NO NO. I'm not saying you have to trash the material, but start your website's directory structure from scratch. You can move the material across when you're ready. I promise you'll be glad you did, especially when your 5 page site develops into a hundred, cos if it's not organised early on, you'll have no chance of keeping it under control later on.

Another thing that I have to stress is file and directory naming conventions. Stick to the basics: max 8 characters, all lower case letters or numbers. No caps, no spaces, no extra dots, no weird wiggly things. Pretend it's 1996 and you're using a 2.0 browser. I may sound a bit uptight about this, but it may save you huge headaches later on. Some servers (especially freespace ones) convert all files to lower case on upload. If you've created all of your internal links based on filenames which had upper case - guess what? Your links just all broke. Consider yourself warned.

Set out your basic framework at the beginning with a good logical structure and it can get bigger than Ben Hur without you losing stuff or ending up confused about your links.

A basic structure that I've found works well is this (by level):

The html pages all go at the first level (ie, directly within "website", not in a subdirectory), and then everything else (eg graphics files) goes in the appropriate subdirectory. For a full examples of a directory structure, have a look at this site's structure. I'll cover more about directory structure in "design".

Now we need to find somewhere for your site to live: