Dreamweaver Series - Structure and Organization

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Dreamweaver Site Structure

Without the proper structure any site that you create will look confusing and unorganized to your target audience. You must understand that there are really two websites you are creating. What your audience will be seeing and what you or your administrators will see. Organization or a complete lack of organization can potentially make or break your website before it even officially launches. Many people neglect proper structure and pay the price. Don't be one of those people.

Don't Let Them Get Lost

You have to direct your audience to where you want them to go. Will they get lost moving from page to page? Can they easily navigate back to your main page from every possible location? A good site should be intuitive and easy enough for anyone to navigate through without getting frustrated and finding another website. Your users should have as a direct of a path as possible to the content that they are looking for. Any vital information, or information that you feel is vital, should be accessible from multiple places on your site.

Creating hyperlinks in Dreamweaver is so simple that almost anyone can do it. The difficult part is making all of your links easy to navigate through.

Behind the scenes

Your "second site" or site within your site is hidden from the public but there nonetheless. Think about more than just how pretty your site is going to look when creating your site. Also think about every file, image, HTML page, sound file, animation and anything else that you add to your site. These all go somewhere. Remember that in the future you most likely will need to come back and update things. Not an easy task if everything is strewn about.

Don't let lack of file organization make managing your site become a nightmare.

Anything beyond one page should definitely be separated into separated into folders and/or directories that will let you know what and where things are. The Dreamweaver files panel will help you a great deal in keeping things organized, but only if you take the time to be organized.

Now What

I just want to briefly mention as well that once you get everything nice and neat, do yourself a favor. Back up your information! I don't know how many times a friend or family member has accidently wiped everything out. Take it from me, recreating an entire website from scratch can be an exercise in frustration. I make multiple backups of any website I create or am creating.

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John David Marcus has 1 articles online

John is a self proclaimed "technerd" that mostly write about networks and technology. But you can also check out his web site about home deep fryers and Delonghi deep fryer deals and reviews.

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Dreamweaver Series - Structure and Organization

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This article was published on 2010/03/29