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Part 1: Planning
It's a pretty sure bet that if you have not redesigned your Web site in the
past several months, you will be soon. The Web is reaching the age where
your sitewhich was state-of-the-art when it was built it two or three
years agois looking a bit stall and dated. But the prospect of redesigning
your site is pretty daunting, especially since odds are that you aren't the
one who designed it originally. There are many facets to a site redesign,
and odds are pretty good that you've never tackled one. Hopefully in this
four-part series we can shed some light on the topic which will ease your
task.
The first step is planning. It's amazing how many people just plunge right
it and start writing HTML with no plan at all. As a starting point, we should
know what we have already. Do a site survey; check out not only the obvious
pages but all the little nooks and crannies of your site as well. Look for
pages that are in your directories but don't seem to be linked into anywhere
elsethey may have links from outside. A good example of this might
be a page called "servers.html" in your root directory, which may be a remnant
from the early days of the Web, when there was an attempt to link in all
Web servers. If you find pages that are not linked from you site, you can
check to see if they are linked to from outside your site by entering the
complete URL as a search term in a search engine such as Altavista. High-traffic
pages, especially those with a great number of external links, may need to
remain in place even though they will get a new look and feel. As you design
your new site, you should take into account the existing site but don't let
preexisting pages and structures lock you into anything in the process; we
will handle their existence later in the project. Design your site to be
clean and functional; we're not going to go into detail about this here as
this article is not about design per se but rather the site redesign process.
Without going into detail, you should plan the site on paper so the structure
and flow of the site is clear before you begin to build it. Plan, plan, plan.
Have a good idea of what you will do before you ever grasp your mouse or
put your fingers to the keyboard.
TO
PART 2 -->>
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