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Publishing Archives.
Writing and Publishing, Part 39:
Becoming your own publisher:
Marketing:
Creating a web site:
Design and Layout:
It is possible to find people and firms who will design and build
a website for you. There are many of these people around. Earthlink
is one outfit which provides this service. It is not necessary
to seek designers out. Once you have established a company identity
some of them will find you. That is one way to get your site up
and running fast. One down side is in finding someone you can
trust to do it right. Some of the most confusing and kludgy sites
I have visited were built by, so called, professionals.
Another down side is cost. Having it done for you will cost money. If cost is a serious consideration you may want to follow my route. As I have said I designed and built my own site. Besides time my cost was the price of the software I used to build the site; about $150.00. The up side is, since I built the site, I can understand and maintain it easily. This is another cost issue. To keep your visitors interested you will need to update your site often. Having someone else do that can be cost prohibitive.
Even if you decide to have someone else design and build your site you will want to understand what is going on. You will want to avoid relying on blind trust as much as possible. If possible you will also want to be able to update your site. That is the purpose of these website essays.
First, I must define my terms. Design and layout are different but similar. Layout has to do with how a thing, in this case a website, appears to the user. Design is about how you get it to appear that way. Design is also about how easily the thing can be serviced, expanded, and maintained. Both have to do with usability or lack thereof.
I have had to redesign and reconfigure my own website twice because I did not take the time to implement the basic principles of good design in the beginning. On the third time I finally got it right. What I did wrong at first was to make expansion of my site difficult. Every time I went to add a feature the structure became more difficult to manage. In programming that lack of organization would be called spaghetti code. A person with my background really should not do that, but I did.
Now I have a structure which can be expanded to any size. At least that is what I believe. One design goal was to avoid deep nesting. I wanted the visitor to be able to get to any page at my site with no more than three mouse clicks. Another goal was to have my site organized by category. I wanted similar things to be grouped together.
I also wanted to have no confusion about site navigation. No matter what page is being viewed the path to any other page should be obvious. I made that possible by implementing a site links frame. That is the frame to the left of the screen. It will remain there regardless of what page is in the main frame.
The final organization goal was to make my site maintenance easy. To do that I created a hierarchical directory structure within my domain. Each directory groups similar items. The only exception is the separate file called index.html. This is the file a web browser will look for when it first accesses a site. The index file contains all the information needed to display the home page of the site. Here is my final directory structure.
WWW
This is
the top directory at the Wesoomi website.
index.html
topfiles
Contains
the home page and other key files.
columns
Contains
the five column pages which are updated each week.
aboutus
Contains
the pages of information about Wesoomi Publishing.
publicat
Contains the pages
about our publications and excerpts.
images Any
images which must be displayed are kept here.
links
Contains the pages of links to other websites.
cookhous
Contains the archives of previous
recipes.
evies
Contains the archives of Evie's previous columns.
gaffers
Contains
the archives of the Gaffer's previous columns.
numbers
Contains the archives
of William's series on math.
wandp Contains
the archives of this series on writing and publishing.
williams
Contains the archives
of pervious columns from William's Corner.
One very important item which I implemented is what I call a site map and shortcuts. This is a page which show the relationships between all of the pages at the Wesoomi website. Notice that this map closely parallels my directory structure. Each underlined item is actually a link to that particular page.
|
Site Map and Shortcuts Wesoomi Index Wesoomi Home Page Frame 1 Logo Frame 2 Link Bar | |--->Site Map and Shortcuts | |--->About Wesoomi | |--->About Willie Gaffer | |--->Our Sales Policy & Terms | |--->About Our Company | |--->Our Publishing Philosophy | |--->Our Web Philosophy | |--->Our Publications | |--->The Siege of Acheron | |--->Supreme Commander George | |--->The Gaffer's Shorts | |--->The Wesoomi Gardening Journal | |--->The Anatomy of a PC | |--->Our Booklets | |--->Preview Our Planned Publications | |--->Price and Ordering Information | |--->Order Form | |--->The Gaffer Says |--->Madam Bellenda Speaks |--->William's Corner |--->Louie's Thought for the Week |--->The Cookhouse Cuisinier |
|--->Our Archives | |--->William's Archives | |--->Evie's Archives | |--->Gaffer's Archives | |--->William's Numbers | |--->Cookhouse Cuisinier Archives | |--->On Writing and Publishing | |--->Send us Mail | |--->Mail to the Editor | |--->Mail to Willie Gaffer | | --->Mail to Evelina | |--->Mail to Louie | |--->Mail to William's Corner | |--->Mail to the Great Booboo | |--->Links to the Web | |--->Portals | |--->Kids, Tall and Small | | --->Magazines & Books | |--->Sports | |--->News | |--->Small Publishers | |--->Computer Products | |--->Gardening | |--->Tools | |--->Government | |--->General Merchandise | |--->Useful Information | |--->William's Favorites |
Next time I will begin discussing the details of web site creation.
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