Site Layout and Construction
The key to an effective web site is effective organization, from the designer's viewpoint, and to effective navigation from the user's. Luckily, the two are connected!
What you need to do before you begin construction of your site is to plan it carefully and decide what sections you wish to include. For example, do you want to include personal information in the site, and if so, how much? How many courses do you want to eventually include?
One thing to remember, your web site will, and should, always be a work in progress. Therefore, you need to think of not only where you are now, but where you would like to go with your site and plan accordingly.
The key to effective organization is remembering that electronic organization should be similar to your filing cabinet: you do not put all of your files into one folder, and you may even have separate drawers for different courses. Unlike your filing cabinet, on the web, you can successfully put a folder within a folder, and are encouraged to do so. On the web, put related files into folders (or subdirectories) and use different levels.
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This image is an example of what not to do. Everything is on the same level and is very linear. This kind of organization does not utilize the possibilities of the web. |
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This kind of organization is standard. There is one homepage, then many major sub-pages and then plenty of content pages that follow the major sub-pages.
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Here is another way to look at the organization:
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Or, if you are more comfortable with the standard pc view of files, your web site would look like this image.
Servers are programed to look for "index.html" as a start page, so you don't need to add the "index.html" into the url. So, you can tell someone the address of the University page is: http://www.ua.edu instead of http://www.ua.edu/index.html
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