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Website Redesign
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Part 2: Building the new site But where to build your new site? We suggest that you put the entire site on another server or at another address on your existing server. Even if you don't have a second server or even any IP addresses to spare, you can configure your server to create one or more virtual servers at another port address. It's not unusual for me to have as many as five servers running on one IP address. The default port for the Web server is 80, and "tradition" says that additional servers run on 8000-series ports; the most commonly occurring ports are probably 8001 and 8080. Building your new site on a live Web port allows you to continuously view your pages as delivered by a server—I even run a server on my laptop while not connected to the net so I can get an accurate view of pages under development. This also allows you to share your site-to-be with others who have a stake in it. You can even password-protect it as necessary. If this is just not possible, build it in a new subdirectory of your existing site; you have to build a new directory structure anyway. Build your site from the ground up as though it were new. Create templates of the most common types of pages to ease your site-building task. You may find that your design evolves as you build your site; while this is natural, at some point you need to lock it into place. You may find it easier to include style sheets within pages as you design them but once you "lock" the design, you should extract the styles into one or more external style sheets. The site redesign is a great opportunity to add JavaScripts, DHTML, and Java applets. As you add these types of items, ensure that they comply with two rules: cross-browser compatibility and graceful degradation. Cross-browser compatibility is pretty obvious: the scripts or applets should work equally well in Internet Explorer or Netscape Communicator. Graceful degradation means that if the page is viewed with an older browser that does not support the new features, the page design should be such that lack of the applet or scripts' functionality does not diminish the usability of the page. Put any necessary content from your existing site into the new site by cutting and pasting into the templates. TO PART 3 -->> |
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Last Updated
March 09, 2000