HTML, XHTML, & CSS All-in-One For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2. Planning Your Sites

In This Chapter

• Planning multipage Web sites

• Working with the client

• Analyzing the audience

• Building a site plan

• Creating XHTML and CSS templates

• Fleshing out the project

At some point, your Web efforts begin to grow. Rather than think about single Web documents, you begin to build more complex systems. Most real-life Web problems require a lot more than a single page to do the work. How do you make the transition to a site with many different but interconnected pages? How do you think through the process of creating a site that serves a specific purpose?

You might even be thinking about doing commercial Web development work. If so, it's definitely time to think about how to put together a plan for a customer.

Creating a Multipage Web Site

A complete Web site has these characteristics:

• A consistent theme: All the pages in a Web site should be about something — a product, a shop, a hobby. It doesn't matter much what the theme is, but the pages should be unified around it.

• Consistent design: The site should have a unified color scheme. All pages should have the same (or similar) layout, and the font choices and images should all use a similar style.

• A navigation scheme: Users must have a clear method to move around from page to page. The organization of the pages and their relationships should be clear.

• A common address: Normally, all pages in a site are on the same server and have a common DNS name so that they're easy to distinguish.

Obviously, the skills of Web ...