Tips

1
Tips Tricks for Maintaining Your Web Site

• Session Objectives
• Share practical advice on maintaining a web site
• Get How To tricks with hands on exercises
• Look at existing sites to see what works

2
Tips

• Know your audience
• Define your web site objectives
• Develop a Content Plan
• Start with a simple design
• Use the best HTML authoring tool you can afford
• Test your page in all browsers
• Not all pages will display the same in Internet
  Explorer and Netscape Navigator

3
Trick 1 Plan Your Content

• Start with a laundry list of content
• Hands On Create a content list
• Example contentlist.doc
• Organize the content into categories or topics
• Hands On Organize your content list
• Example categorylist.doc
• Determine navigation topics from your content
  categories
• Hands On Create your navigation topic list
• Example Navigation list.doc

4
Trick 2 Simple Design

• Use a consistent and simple web page design.
• One page design layout for the Home page
• One page design layout for all subpages
• Homepage Conventions from Homepage Usability 50
  Websites Deconstructed by Jakob Nielsen, Marie
  Tahir
• 84 of sites place their logo in the upper left
  corner
• 35 place SEARCH in the upper right, 30 in upper
  left
• 60 of sites have an explicit contact page, 22
  use About Us for contact information.

5
Trick 3 Navigation Style

• Choose an easy to use navigation style and stick
  to it
• Left column navigation usually used for all
  second level or subtopic page navigation
• Example The Chronicle of Higher Education
• Top of page navigation usually used for keeping
  the main topics of the site on all the pages
• Example World Lecture Hall
• Common Home Page styles
• Example Discovery.Com
• Example Cnet.com

6
Trick 4 Determine the Directory Structure

• Map folders to the navigation topics
• Always have an index page in each folder
• Search engines look at index pages
• Know how to use relative links
• Example Directory Tree Structure
• Main folder for the Higher Ed Home Page
  he/index.html
• subfolder conf2k2/sessions.html
• relative link ../conf2k2/sessions.html
• Sub-sub folder advo01/advo0112/dialog.html
• Relative link ../../advo0112

7
Key Features of Authoring Tools

• An Active template
• Use separate template for each unique page layout
• Active templates update all web pages when the
  template changes.
• Demonstration Dreamweaver active Local Web
  template
• Site Management
• Fixes broken links
• Checks for orphaned files
• Shows HTML code, pseudo WYSIWYG and browser
  preview

8
Trick 5 Faking the active template

• Cut Paste and Save as will also work!
• Hands-on Exercises using a template
• Create a home page and subpage using Netscape
  Composer
• Fixing broken links manually
• Working with tables

9
Helpful Resources

• Diary of a Webmaster Part 1 My Site Design
  Checklist - a must read article
• http//www.WebmasterBase.com/article/655
• Sitepoints Free things to help build pages
• http//www.webmasterbase.com/free/
• An Online Web Site planner
• http//webthejoint.com/SitePlanner/
• Web Page Analyzer
• http//watson.addy.com/