Planning a Site
Here is a list of the steps you should plan when creating a new site:
- Think long and hard about exactly what is to be published, how it is to be broken down into pages, and how navigation between those pages will work. A good rule of thumb is that no page should be more than three clicks from another. (If necessary, map it all out with pencil and paper!)
- Think about your page design. Make sure you understand the fundamental difference between paper and electronic documents, especially how Size Matters - for text, for graphics and even the windows in which people will view your site.
- Create a "Master Page", being careful to distinguish between Content and Styling, which will act as a template for your site's pages.
- Create a copy of your "master.html" file named "index.html" and use it to create your home page. Create further copies of your master file, as necessary, to generate any further pages.
- Upload the lot to your hosting service!
Expect the time consuming bit of this to be planning the structure of the site and coming up with the design (i.e. Steps 1-3). There is a tendency with beginners to want to get straight into generating the content (Step 4), but without a lot of experience, this always produces messy awkward amateurish looking sites with no consistency from page to page and a nightmare site to find your way around.
Templates (called the Master Page on this site) are a very necessary part of the web site creation process but, as you can see from the above, a template facility within the software isn't. Finally, do not be deceived! Grabbing a pre-designed template from the web is rarely either a quick or easy solution for a first timer to build a web site, as you will need a full understanding of a template's structure to take best advantage of it.
Page updated: 9 July 2010