It's all in the planning - Part 3

Now that you've sorted out the main design features of your website, it's time to consider the mechanics of making it work. Fire up your authoring package and let's go!

No matter whether you've decided on a horseshoe, half horseshoe, vertical or horizontal navigation layouts, the next question you'll need to address is "How shall I implement it on the page?". Because your navigation is a "static" feature, there are three or four ways you can go about it, and each will be easier or harder, depending on which Web Authoring package you use.

Frames

If you're a FrontPage user, you may well be drawn to using Frames to lay your pages out. Indeed, they're a very effective way of maintaining consistency in design, but they have one horrible by-product - they're slow to load (usually) and they can also be an absolute pig to get right in terms of making sure that the right bit of HTML code loads in the right place at the right time.

If search engine placement is important to you, Frames can be a real sticking point - not all search engines can follow links in a Frames oriented site at all well. In fact, the biggest search engines don't handle frames in any meaningful way. So, probably not the best choice here, then.

Includes

Included pages are neat - you can create a navigation setup as an HTML page, and simply "include" it in your other pages. Again, if you use FrontPage, this is a doddle to achieve. Be warned, however, that if your host server is equipped with the FrontPage Extensions FrontPage includes work differently from the way they perform if the server is not extended for it. Indeed, in this writer's opinion, you're better off without the extensions, because then, FrontPage itself constructs the final HTML code as it uploads the page, so the included page doesn't have to be found from the server itself. This can make for very fast loading pages (and it's a technique we use here for certain parts of the site layout).

Templates

A forte of Dreamweaver in all its guises, templates can be a boon - you simply set the page up, and use the template to create further pages. You can do a similar sort of thing in FrontPage as well, by creating the page and keeping it devoid of content, simple opening it, inserting the content, and saving it with its final name (this is actually what we do on PPC - we have pre-made templates for each section).

JavaScript

Finally, you can create JavaScript code which will call your navigation from any page in your site - a combination of templating and includes.

Checking

Whichever way you decide to go (and I'd suggest a combination of Includes and Templates) you'll need to create a skeleton of your site that consists of the basic folder/directory layout and dummy pages in each part, so that you can check that your navigation works across directories. You'll need to check that each link leads where it's supposed to, in the way it's supposed to, and that everything hangs together the way it should.

To get this right, start with the your home page, and then create the area indexes. Make sure that, as you add each one, its links back to the home page work properly, and that links back to the indexes work. The create your dummy content pages, and, again, check the links. Don't, at this point, even contemplate adding any content other than a "content goes here" message. The aim is to make sure that the navigation works first time every time.

A great hint here is to try to make sure that any given piece of content is never more than three clicks away from whichever page you're on - in the PPC site, any article in the same section should never be more than two clicks away, and even articles in different sections can mostly be got to in two clicks, but are never more than three clicks from where you're at.

There's enough there to keep you busy for quite a while. Next time, we'll look at actually adding the content to your site.

Read part one

Read part two

Read part four

 

David Dorn