Creating websites

Planning the content

A website, generally, is a collection of resources (typically pages), rather than being just a single page.  Creating a site requires more planning than just a page.  As well as having to understand the technicalities of authoring HTML, you have to understand some technicalities about your web server, and plan how you're going to put all your resources together.

For this guide, I started out by writing a simple table of contents.  It outlined the areas I wanted to cover, and which parts would be handled separately (on their own pages).  Then, as I wrote each page, I added more specific details to the table of contents, added references between pages, and entries to the index page.

Style guides

As well as planning the content, I also made a plan about the style.  Coming up with a plan about styling certain types of things in a consistent manner (examples, comment, etc.), and authoring the pages to fit into the guide.  Developing a site plan and style guide helps to stop a project from turning into chaos, and makes it easier to maintain and modify.

Structuring the content

If you're creating a website with a lot of files, it can help to put things into directories.  Depending on the complexity, it could be just to keep images, stylesheets, and HTML separate from each other, or it could be separating different areas of content (like this web guide is in a different directory than other sections of my website).

When naming files and directories, it helps to name the files in a manner related to the content.  Not only does this help you find the right things, for later modifications; but it also helps search engines catalogue a site (they can use the names of resources, as well as their contents).  You also need to ensure that you don't name things in a manner that can't be done on the internet.  For instance, blank spaces are forbidden in URIs, and so are various other characters (sticking to just using lower-case letters of the English alphabet, and numbers, is the safest bet).

Naming things in a coherent manner helps visitors who've got lost (many people arrive at a site via a search engine, and will probably not arrive at the first page).  If you have a contents page, then calling it “contents” helps people (they're able to easily type it directly into the address gadget, and jump straight to it; as well as being able to make a reasonable guess at where links will take them, if they look at the address for something without any textual hint, such as when graphics are used).  Likewise for an index page (a real “index”, not the default page served for a directory).

Provide navigational links on each page, in an easy to find location, which lead directly to a few main places (e.g. the homepage, contents page, index, help, etc.).  As already mentioned, many visitors arrive via another website into the middle of a site.  If there's no navigational links, they can't easily explore the rest of the site (only having links to the previous or next page, aren't very helpful).

Putting content on the WWW

For many people, creating a website involves putting files (that they've authored) onto a remote server.  I can't go into the specifics of how to do that for every service, because there's too many different answers, but the most common is using FTP (file transfer protocol), it's the name of the process, and you use an FTP client program.  You really need to find out how to put files on your host (look for their help guides, or ask them about it), find a suitable program to handle that for you (if you don't already have one), and read its own documentation to learn how to use it.  For some people, their host will be their ISP, others will use an independent host, some will serve their website direct from their own machine.

When creating a website on a remote host, it's important to remember that different systems have different limitations (between yours and theirs, and the others used to view your webpages),and different methods of working.  Here's three main areas that need addressing:

Authoring so visitors can find your work

As already mentioned, one of the most common ways people find a website, is through a search engine.  So, if you want people to find your site, you have to author it in a way that enables it to be well indexed by a search engine.  This means things like:

Search engines will index resources based on a number of different ways (the names of the resources, their titles, headings and content on them, descriptions inside links, etc.), and can describe the page in various ways (snippets from the start of the page, snippets taken from some of the content around the keywords they searched for, meta data written about the page, etc.).

Also, people will generally arrive at the page that search engine mentioned, not the front page.  You need to consider this while authoring pages.  You should ensure that all pages have links to the main sections of the website, or visitors can get stuck at a single page (at the very least, you should have a link to the home page, if not to all of the main sections).  You should also have inter-page linking, though don't expect people to work through an entire site to find what they're looking for.  Links should have clearly obvious functions, avoid using obscure words or icons.  Make your site easy for people to use.

Related to that, my own web logs show that most people who arrive via a search engine only look at the page they first loaded (i.e. they don't trawl through the website).  With that in mind, it's best to keep all of the content about any one particular topic on the one page, and to write about different topics on their own pages.

A bit of advocacy for proper HTML authoring

Remember, a website that “appears to work” doesn't mean that it's correct, and isn't likely to break in someone's browser, unless you ensure that it actually is correct.

If you're using a programming language to generate a website (e.g. PHP), then you should still learn how to write HTML by hand, as you'll need to be able to write your programs so that they output correct HTML; and you'll probably need to correct some pre-built doodahs that come with your programming language, because they often create HTML incorrectly.

If I create all my pages properly, using real headings instead of tricks with fonts, etc., then I can generate the site's table of contents, by having the computer assess each page, making links to any heading with an “id”, and using the heading as the words in the link.  Not only does this make it easy to generate the table of contents page, but it also makes it easy to update, should the site's contents be modified.

Testing that you got it right

You really should properly check for problems with your pages, not just try them out in your own browser, but with programs designed as error checkers (there's links to some, on the references page of this guide).  You can't use a web browser to error-check a webpage, they ignore a lot of errors, and someone else's web browser may handle them differently than yours (so you can't assume that because your browser copes with your pages, that someone else's browser will).

Check for HTML errors, CSS errors, errors in the addresses in any linked resources, as well as general typing and spelling errors.


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