Datasheet

What the user sees
The side that the user sees is all about navigation. When users arrive at your
home page, where do you direct them? How do they move from one page to
another in your site? A good Web site is designed so that users navigate
easily and intuitively and can make a beeline to the information most relevant
to them. As you plan, make sure that users can
 Access key information easily from more than one place in the site
 Move back and forth easily between pages and sections
 Return to main pages and subsections in one step
Setting links is easy in Dreamweaver; the challenge is to make sure that those
links are easy for visitors to follow.
What’s behind the scenes
The second side to managing your Web site structure happens behind the
scenes (where your users can’t see the information, but you want some kind
of organizational system to remember what’s what). Before you get too far
into building your site with Dreamweaver, spend some time thinking about
the management issues involved in keeping track of all the files you create for
your site. Files are all the images, HTML pages, animations, sound files, and
anything else you put in your Web site.
Once your Web site grows past a handful of pages, organizing them in sepa-
rate folders or directories can help you keep track. Fortunately, Dreamweaver
makes this easy by providing a Files panel, shown in Figure 1-8, where you
can see all the files of your site and even move and rename files and folders.
(You find detailed instructions for organizing the files and folders in a Web
site in Chapters 2 and 4.)
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Chapter 1: The Many Ways to Design a Web Page
Under construction? No hard hats here!
All good Web sites are under construction —
always. It’s the nature of the Web. But build your
site in such a way that you can add pages when
they’re ready instead of putting up placehold-
ers. Don’t greet your viewers with a guy in a
yellow hat who seems to say, “You clicked this
link for no good reason. Come back another day,
and maybe we’ll have something for you to
see.” Instead of creating “Under Construction”
placeholders, create directory structures that
make adding new pages later easy. You can let
readers know that new things are coming
by putting notices on pages that already have
content — a message like “Come here next
Thursday for a link to something even cooler” is
a great idea. But never make users click a link
and wait for a page to load, only to find that noth-
ing but a guy with a hard hat is waiting for them.
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