Planning Your Web Site

Site Content

If you want to attract a large audience, remember how many sites there are out there -- your's will have to have something special in order to get people to visit you. You may, of course, be happy with just a small number of "hits" a day, but even so, you owe it to your visitors to give them a site worth visiting.

The Site Layout

There are really two basic structures. All sites will start with a main opening page. This you can think of as the "hub", with spokes radiating out to the different sections of your site. On some sites, each page of a section will lead on to the next, rather like this:

In other cases it would make more sense to allow your visitors to get to any page on your site from the home page:

Most sites will be a combination of the two basic types, but whichever layout you adopt, you should make it easy to get back to the "hub" -- your home page. Don't make your visitors use the 'Back' button on their browser just to get to another page. Every page should contain links to the pages your user might want to visit next (and, of course, to the home page). Remember to call your home page by a name such as index.html. On many servers the page called index.html or index.htm will be shown to uses who have not specified a particular page. Check with your particular service provider.

By now you should have a clearer idea of what you want to do on your web site, so it's time to start thinking about your Page Layout.