The First Step

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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 mostcrucial step in determining the success of a website.
Let'scompare a website to building a house. Everyone knows the firststep in building a house.
You have to plan everything out andhave a strong foundation to build on.A website is no different from a house. In fact, a website isyour digital dream home, and only you can build it how you like.Most websites that fail on the World Wide Web because they lack asolid foundation on which to expand.
In this article, I will showyou how to create a solid foundation for your site and how toplan and organize your site.Starting OutA lot of people, when they set out to design a website, fire uptheir fancy WYSIWYG editor and start pushing keys left and right.They probably didn't stop to think about how their site would beorganized, where their files would go, or even where they wouldhost their site.These sites are most often the sites that fail, because theirwebmasters get frustrated with the site and the deadends andmental blocks that they hit. All this can be avoided if a site isproperly planned out.
Almost every professional site has spent asignificant 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. Onan 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 easyto get distracted on the Internet, so having the purpose writtenout on paper will help keep you on track.What's Next?Now that we have our site's purpose, we need to determine how oursite is going to fulfill this purpose. These will be the site'sobjectives.
On that same sheet of paper that you wrote out yoursite's purpose, draw a line all the way across the paper. Now,underneath that line, write down three one-sentence objectivesfor your site to accomplish.Now that we have our site's purpose and our site's objectives allwritten down and planned out, you are going to have to keep thatsheet of paper next to your computer in plain sight at all times.Every time you do something on your computer, I want you to askyour self, "Is this helping my site accomplish its objectives andfulfill its purpose?" If you answer no, then you should thinkabout finding something that will make you answer "yes" to thatquestion.File/Folder OrderAnother thing we should do before we move on is to determine howour files and our folders will be stored.
Here we have severaloptions, we can put everything in one folder, we can have aimages folder and put all the HTML files one folder, or we canhave every major section of our site in its own subfolder witheach subfolder having its own images folder.Putting everything in one folder works great for small sites, butwhen your site reaches 500+ pages, updating the site is going tobecome a pain. Finding the page to update will be a big task initself, let alone updating the whole site because you added a newsection.Having one images folder and putting all the HTML in one folderworks a little bit better, but once again, updating the site isgoing to be time consuming.The best way, in my opinion, is to put every major section of thesite within its own folder.
That way, whenever you need toupdate something, you will know exactly where it is. You won'thave to waste time by hunting through many files trying to findthe right one.Looking back now, you should be glad that you didn't just jumpinto the code.
A lot of work has to go into a site before evenone line of code can be written. There are many more steps aheadbefore we start coding our site.
The Second Step deals withcolors and navigation of your site. Article Tags: First Step Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com .