What is the First Step?The first step in ... a website is most likely the ... step in ... the success of a website. ... a website to building a house. Everyone knows the
What is the First Step?
The first step in designing a website is most likely the most crucial step in determining the success of a website. Let's compare a website to building a house. Everyone knows the first step in building a house. You have to plan everything out and have a strong foundation to build on.
A website is no different from a house. In fact, a website is your digital dream home, and only you can build it how you like. Most websites that fail on the World Wide Web because they lack a solid foundation on which to expand. In this article, I will show you how to create a solid foundation for your site and how to plan and organize your site.
Starting Out
A lot of people, when they set out to design a website, fire up their fancy WYSIWYG editor and start pushing keys left and right. They probably didn't stop to think about how their site would be organized, where their files would go, or even where they would host their site.
These sites are most often the sites that fail, because their webmasters get frustrated with the site and the deadends and mental blocks that they hit. All this can be avoided if a site is properly planned out. Almost every professional site has spent a significant amount of time planning out their site.
Where to Start?
The best place to start planning out a site is with it's purpose. A site without a purpose will almost always stagnate and fail. On an 8 X 11 piece of paper, write out the purpose of your site. Having the purpose written down on paper will make it seem more "real" than keeping the idea in your head. Also, it's real easy to get distracted on the Internet, so having the purpose written out on paper will help keep you on track.
What's Next?
Now that we have our site's purpose, we need to determine how our site is going to fulfill this purpose. These will be the site's objectives. On that same sheet of paper that you wrote out your site's purpose, draw a line all the way across the paper. Now, underneath that line, write down three one-sentence objectives for your site to accomplish.
Now that we have our site's purpose and our site's objectives all written down and planned out, you are going to have to keep that sheet of paper next to your computer in plain sight at all times. Every time you do something on your computer, I want you to ask your self, "Is this helping my site accomplish its objectives and fulfill its purpose?" If you answer no, then you should think about finding something that will make you answer "yes" to that question.
File/Folder Order
Another thing we should do before we move on is to determine how our files and our folders will be stored. Here we have several options, we can put everything in one folder, we can have a images folder and put all the HTML files one folder, or we can have every major section of our site in its own subfolder with each subfolder having its own images folder.
Putting everything in one folder works great for small sites, but when your site reaches 500+ pages, updating the site is going to become a pain. Finding the page to update will be a big task in itself, let alone updating the whole site because you added a new section.
Having one images folder and putting all the HTML in one folder works a little bit better, but once again, updating the site is going to be time consuming.
The best way, in my opinion, is to put every major section of the site within its own folder. That way, whenever you need to update something, you will know exactly where it is. You won't have to waste time by hunting through many files trying to find the right one.
Looking back now, you should be glad that you didn't just jump into the code. A lot of work has to go into a site before even one line of code can be written. There are many more steps ahead before we start coding our site. The Second Step deals with colors and navigation of your site.
