HTML 4.0 Sourcebook
(Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)
Author(s): Ian S. Graham
ISBN: 0471257249
Publication Date: 04/01/98

Design and Maintenance of a Web Collection

In designing a collection of any type, there are several general rules you should follow—these rules are presented in the following sections. Although most of these rules will seem like common sense, they are often overlooked or unimplemented unless you (a) incorporate them into your design model and (b) implement them early in the design phase for your Web site. It is usually very difficult to back up and fix mistakes once a site is up and running, and these simple rules will help you reduce the number of mistakes you make.

Storyboard the Collection

You have probably noticed the usefulness of schematic drawings in picturing the interrelationships and linkages between web documents. In fact, such drawings are extremely useful in designing web collections—it is always a good idea to sketch out the web layout on paper (or on a computer, if you have a suitable drafting program) and work out the desired relationships before you actually begin preparing the documents. Storyboarding is enormously flexible and lets you experiment with many possibilities before you even start to prepare the pages. Design and navigation problems quickly become apparent when you lay out the overall organization of the pages, as do the choices for the navigational links that must be built into each page. Storyboarding is easy to do and will save you time and effort in the long run.

Prototype the Page Layout and Design

Once you have a Web site design, you now need to implement the technical design elements described in Chapters 1 and 2; each page must contain the required navigational tools and should have a recognizable and well-designed layout. In the latter regard, you should take advantage of the typographic and design principles well-known in the print world. To paraphrase Robin Williams (the graphics designer, not the actor), these principles are:

Contrast. Elements on a page that are not the same should be very different.

Repetition. Elements that repeat through the page or collection should repeat with the same design layout to show the unity of the content and to indicate the organizational structure.

Alignment. Page layout is not arbitrary, and everything placed on the page should have a visual connection to something else.

Proximity. Elements related to one another should be placed close together.

For additional information on this topic, you are referred to Williams’s excellent introductory book on typography and design, listed in the bibliography at the end of the chapter.

Plan for Future Growth and Features

This may seem obvious, but it is not—or, at least, many people seem to ignore this aspect of design. A well-designed collection will age and grow well. Aging well means that pages can be redesigned, with new graphics and a different layout, without affecting the underlying hypertext structure. The same is true for growth. A well-designed collection will have room for new nodes, new trees, and new branches, without requiring the pruning, dismemberment, or outright destruction of the original structure. You must plan ahead—you can do this while storyboarding the first version of your collection—because any good Web site will grow quickly, at which time it is exceedingly difficult to go back and fix basic design flaws.

Make Navigation Easy

This may seem needless repetition, but it is essential that you consistently use good design to make the collection easy to explore. All pages should have links back to master navigational pages, such as the local linear collection’s table of contents or the home page of the local document tree. Also, all pages must have obvious exit points—you don’t want users guessing at what to do next. And, finally, make sure that the links work! All the navigation buttons in the world won’t help if they don’t lead anywhere useful. On the companion Web site, “Web Management and Maintenance Tools” lists some useful utilities for testing hypertext links in a collection of documents, while many publishing systems (such as those mentioned earlier in this chapter) include link checkers as part of the publishing package.

Never Move the Main Pages

Once you have built a popular site, your visitors will bookmark your major navigational pages so that they can return directly to these locations. Therefore, once these pages are put in place, you must never, ever, move them. Doing so will break all your visitors’ stored hotlist or bookmark entries and will cause no end of grief. If you must move pages, make sure to provide server redirection for the main pages⁵ or provide temporary pages in place of the ones that have been deleted, pages that point to the new location. A CGI program that can help with this task is discussed in Chapter 11.

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⁵All servers can be configured to redirect a request from a specific URL to a different location.

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When expanding a collection, you should avoid eliminating pages—only add new ones. This avoids the problem just mentioned and reiterates the importance of properly thinking out the organization of your collection before you start. A well-organized collection has room for easy expansion, whereas an ill-thought-out jumble of pages will not grow easily and will lead to problems when reorganization is required.

Get an Appropriate Internet Domain Name

If you are setting up a major site, you should also obtain a suitable domain name for your HTTP/Web server—names of the form www.mydomain.edu, www.companyname.com, or home.companyname.com are quite common, with the strings www, web, or home quickly identifying this as a Web server site. Once obtained, a domain name can easily be moved from one machine to another, without affecting your visitors. For example, you might initially have the domain name www.myfirm.com referring to a shared machine or a temporary location. Later on, the domain name can be moved to a machine dedicated to your Web services, without affecting the URLs that reference the resources.

Commercial domain names (ending with .com) are registered through the Internet Network Information Centre (InterNIC). This is accessible over the Web at:

www.internic.net

There is currently a registration fee of around $US 100. Many Internet providers will help you obtain domain names, for a small additional fee. Given the technical issues involved, this is probably worth the extra expense. And if you want a commercial name, you should hurry—most of the good names are already taken!