Website Organisation

Maxims

• Be brief
• Keep to the point
• Don't make the reader wait (unless it's really worth it!)
• Do not send the reader on a wild goose chase.
• Sun's Guide to Web Style is a very well-expressed collection of such maxims.

General Principles

• Discretion. Just because you can do something with the Web doesn't mean it's a good idea.
• Connectivity: Create an underlying structure that makes sense with respect to the structure of the underlying subject matter. Choose appropriate connectivity amongst the content pages.
• Navigation. Place appropriate textual and visual clues in the documents that make the structure obvious.

Connectivity

• Tangled Web



 
 
 

• Encourages exploration
• Easy to get lost
• Hard to update
• Difficult for user to know that all pages have been visited.

 
 
• Linear Chain




• Little room for exploration.
• Easy to maintain
• Not very different to a book
• Good for documents that have a natural linear flow, e.g. reference manuals, short stories.

 
 
• Tree



 

• A single "index" page is used as the entry point to all other pages. Index pages can have take several forms, e.g. as a "home" page, a table of contents, an alphabetical list.
• Each content page has at least three links: one to the next page, one to the previous page, and one to the parent.
• This paradigm can be extended, creating a tree in which a master index page points to "subtrees" having a similar structure.

Navigation: The Hyperspace Compass

• Previous, Next (, ) are used to navigate a a series of linearly linked pages.
• Up ()takes the reader up a level, e.g. to the start of a chapter or to the parent index page.
• Down is less frequently used, since for the most part, going down from a given page means clicking a link on that page.
• Top is often used to return the reader to the main index page of the site.

Exercise 4

1. Using Windows, create a local directory for your department, office or course, and within it, create a subdirectory (e.g. "people" for information about the people in your group, or "topics" for information about your course).
2. For each subdirectory, create an "index.html" and start to fill it with relevant information. Try including some tabular information as shown above. You might wish to copy and adapt items in the templates directory for this step.
3. When you feel ready, test the system using the browser, adding and changing the contents as you like.
4. Publish the entire hierarchy of files in your web directory.