Designing Your Site
Designing your website and designing your first page go together. This stuff is addictive. Eventually you will have many pages (one of my sites has 600! -- fortunately I didn't write all of them.) You want visitors to be able to easily navigate through all the pages and be able to find their way back, to find what they are looking for and be able to tell others where to find it.
The introduction to your site is a real writing exercise. You want to cover all the interests on your site in one or two paragraphs, without being confusing. Then you want to provide links to individual pages that cover each of these interests in detail.
If you are a professional tree surgeon whose hobbies are quilting, hiking and haiku poetry, a member of a national organization to prevent child abuse, want to publish information about recent floods to correct popular misconceptions and help prevent future disasters, think Dr. Katz should have a fan page, and you have four children and two cats who all want to be on the web -- you don't want to put all that on one page. It will take three years to load and no-one will ever see it.
But if you describe all that in one paragraph, people who are looking for quilting can find your page and follow the links to your quilting samples; people who are researching floods can find your page and follow the link to flood information; your children's friends and grandparents can find their pictures and stories; and so on.
Another example:
Hi! My name is Joselle Mikki! This is my first webpage! I hope you like it!
Page 1
Page 2 Page 3
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Page 4
Page 5 Page 6
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Please sign my guestbook!
Y'all hurry back now, y'hear?
So -- what was that all about?
Let's see if we can help Joselle be a little more informative.
Hello! My name is Joselle Mikki. I am 14 years old, a Sophomore at Aldebaran High School in New Age, New Jersey. I am one of the editors of our school paper, the Aldebaran Age, and a member of the Future Reporters of America. I've created this webpage to tell you about myself, my school, my Best friends -- and some of the news stories in our paper that I think are important to everyone.
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Try this form to help you write your introductory page:
Your Name: Your Nickname(s): Organizations you belong to:
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Things you feel very strongly about; Things
you want people to know about:
Why did you create a webpage?
For each page: What do you want a person to do, think or feel as the result of visiting this page? |
Hopefully, that will spark your ideas for constructing your site. Feel free to send in your ideas to WebWriter for feedback.
I cover more aspects of designing an effective webpage on Effective Activism on the Internet. There are common considerations in being effective whether you are selling an idea or a product, or trying to get your visitors to stay around long enough to see pictures of your cat.
One more consideration while you are setting up your site. This stuff is addictive: you may end up with a hundred pages and several hundred graphics, midis, movies and whatnot. I find it much less confusing if I have sub-directories for each major section of my site, and in each section to separate HTML, images, and midis.
Example:
- John's Books, Cats & Trains Site
- index.html (main page)
- images directory
- images on main page; images that all pages share
- books directory
- index.html (main books page)
- classics.html (first category of books)
- sf.html (second category of books)
- mystery.html (third category of books)
- clubs.html (fourth book page)
- images directory
- images on books pages
- cats directory
- index.html (main cats page)
- images directory
- images on cats page
- trains directory
- index.html (main trains page)
- images directory
- images on trains page
Exercise:
If you choose to do this as a workshop, write a chart for which pages you are going to include on your site and where you are going to put them; also write the introductory paragraphs to your first page. Post this to webwriter@yahoogroups.com
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