Datasheet

12
Part I: Creating Great Web Sites
Developing a New Site
In a nutshell, building a Web site involves creating individual pages and link-
ing them to other pages. You need to have a home page, the first page visi-
tors see when they arrive at your Web address, (also known as your URL),
and that page needs to bring them into the rest of the pages of the site, usu-
ally with links to each of the main sections of the site. Those pages, in turn,
link to subsections that can then lead to deeper subsections.
A big part of planning a Web site is determining how to divide the pages of
your site into sections and how those sections should link to one another.
Dreamweaver makes creating pages and setting links easy, but how you orga-
nize the pages is up to you.
If you’re new to this, you may think you don’t need to worry much about how
your Web site will grow and develop. Think again. All good Web sites grow,
and the bigger they get, the harder they are to manage. Planning the path of
growth for your Web site before you begin can make a tremendous difference
later. Neglecting to think about growth is probably one of the most common
mistakes among new designers. This becomes even more serious when more
than one person is working on the same site. Without a clearly established
site organization and some common conventions for tasks like naming files,
confusion reigns.
Managing your site’s structure
Managing the structure of a Web site has two sides: the side that users see,
which depends on how you set up links, and the side that’s behind-the-
scenes, which depends on how you organize files and folders.
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. One of the best ways to ensure that
visitors can easily move around your site is to create a navigation or menu
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