 Web Design, Part 2Site Organization7 March 2000
Dan Knight
Let's start with a note on include files (the topic of the previous
article). If you include a "/" in your reference as in <A
HREF="/old?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lowendmac.com%2Fnews%2Findex.shtml&y=1999"> instead of <A
HREF="/old?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lowendmac.com%2Ftech%2Fnews%2Findex.shtml&y=1999">, then it will not matter where the file
is located -- and will always look for it from a base in the root
directory. In other words, it won't be dependent on file
location.Next site revision, I'm going to work with that. Another thing I didn't cover, since it varies by server, is naming
conventions. Some servers will do SSI for any web page, but others
insist they have a ".shtml" extension. The server I'm on doesn't care
about file naming, but Home Page insists I end my include files with
".txt" -- so that's what I do. Be sure to check with your host how
things have to be configured on your server.
I learned web design and site organization on the fly. One lesson
I learned early on is that you don't want to move things around once
people on the outside have linked to your site. And the longer your
site has been around, the more careful you should be about it. Case Study: Low End MacThe beginningLow End Mac started out in the /lem/ directory of my personal
Iserv account, along with some graduate school research and a
smattering of other things. At first, the site only covered Macs from
the Plus through the Mac II line. Organization was into three
subdirectories: - /lem/ii/ for the Mac II models
- /lem/lc/ for the LC models
- /lem/plus/ for the Plus and other compact Macs
Inside the /lem/ directory was The New Low End User
Site's home page, index.html, with links to the various
computers. You can view the site as it looked in April 1997 (with
only the most minor of modifications) here.
It was a very light home page: three small graphics and under 10K of
code. the only other page in the root directory was an abortive
attempt at offering classified ads. It was a very stark site weighing in at about 50K plus three small
graphics. There were no pictures on the computer profile pages. There
weren't even index pages in the subdirectories. Everything was
accessed from the home page. If you look at it, you'll find that a
lot of the organizational principles remain to this day. Two months laterBy June 1997, I'd added Quadras and 68k PowerBooks to the site at
the request of many visitors. I'd joined the Mac Cognoscenti ring and
LinkExchange to promote the site. I was probably serving somewhere
over 10,000 pages a month, although I have not site stats from that
era. (In July, I served over 20,000 pages.) I'd added "Mac" to the
site's name, and I even had a fancy graphic:  The home page had more links,
more color, and a few more helpful links. Organization was haphazard.
Quadra and Centris models were in the /040/ directory, while
PowerBooks were in /pb/. I'd also added the Macintosh 128K, 512K, and
512Ke on the low end. I even had a picture of the Mac IIcx and IIci
-- the only model so blessed at the time. All the "Vintage Macs" were indexed on one
page, which covered the compacts, the NuBus models, and the
non-NuBus ones. There were a lot of good links here. The PowerBook and Quadra indexes weren't even in the same
directory as the computer profiles. and it would get worse before it
got better. Two months after thatBy August 1997, I'd published my first editorials. I had a lot
more pictures on the site. I had a new name, The Low End Mac
User, and a shorter URL: http://come.to/lowendmac. I was
in the 17-20,000 hit per month range. I'd joined the Mac Web Network
banner exchange. And I was experimenting with tables as a design
element. And I had a new banner:  At this point, I was trying to find sponsors and sell ads, but
that never went anywhere. Site organization was terrible. But I was
still learning. As I look back, in some ways I'm very pleased with
what I was doing. In other ways, it's embarrassing. (No, I won't even
show you what the site looked like back then. It had grown to 1.1 MB
from the original 50K. Files were scattered everywhere.) Low End Mac and MacTimesMacTimes approached Low End Mac about hosting the site for free --
and offering a percentage of ad revenue generated by the site. Low
End Mac moved to the MacTimes server during November 1997, which gave
me the opportunity to tidy up some messy site issues. (You knew this
was coming to organization sooner or later, didn't you.) At this point, all the index pages were moved into appropriate
folders, no longer left loose in the main directory. Editorial
content was moved to its own folder. After all, since everything was
going to be at a new URL, this was the perfect opportunity to make
some site changes. It was during this time that I learned how to market the site,
sending news releases to other Mac-centric sites when I added new
content. It worked. Low End Mac rocketed from 21,000 pages served in
October to 59,000 in December. Low End Mac was no longer perceived as
just a personal hobby site, but as a player. During the late 1998, we had our nightmare week: our new server
required that all out pages using Server Side
Includes end with .shtml, not .html. I discovered an incredible
prerelease shareware program called Site
Ranger that would let me rename files or folders one at a time,
then update every link on the site. It probably cut my time
investment by 80-90%, and I became the first registered shareware
user for this incredible fast program. Moving to lowendmac.comIn mid-February Low End Mac moved to its own domain, which again
meant all the old URLs were defunct. It was a second opportunity to
update the site, which included moving the iMac Channel into Low End
Mac (it had been a subsite of MacTimes) and renaming a few
directories, such as making the /040/ into /quadra/. Again, Site
Ranger greatly simplified and sped up the process. (If you need a
program that does what Site Ranger does, it's worth its weight in
latinum and dilithium crystals.) We've been at lowendmac.com, and later lowendmac.net (both point
to the same pages) since. Organizational PrinciplesAs I noted above, I have no formal training in web design. I
created the site to meet my own needs to have data on older Macs
readily available. I organized it for quick access to that data. The basic organizational principle is to keep almost everything
within two clicks of the home page and as many other pages as
possible. A corollary to this is a fairly flat structure for the site. While
some sites have level after level of content, almost everything on
Low End Mac is one level down from the root directory. There are very
few subdirectories, and most of those are used to hold graphics. It's
a very simple organization, one that works hand in glove with
two-click access. But the biggest lesson of all is one that cost me days and days of
work: plan your organization before you begin. Most of that time
spent in Site Ranger renaming files and folders, and moving files,
could have been eliminated if I had planned a bit more before
creating new pages and directories. And that's the key lesson this week: plan your site organization
-- fixing it later can be costly, since it will break links from
outside your site. Consider implementing a two-click rule and a
relatively flat, easy to understand organization so anyone can
understand how your site works. 
- <this article available in a printer-friendly
version>
Recent articles on Online Tech Journal
- <back to Online
Tech
Journal>
| 
