This series of articles spans the five (5) key areas and will provide you with an excellent overview of the subject matter. An excellent primer for novice Webmasters.

Usability

Building

Promoting

Improving

Services

Archives

News

Recommended Links

Site Layout & Usability
Article V of V

by Brandon Jubar

Anatomy of a Directory

The top levels of a good directory should closely resemble the layout of your site. In our discussion, we have used demographics to decide upon our topic areas, so our folders might be:

• Families
• Children
• Teens
• Young Adult'.

Within a demographic folder, you may want to include yet another level that mirrors your site. Let's say that, under 'Teens', we have the folders:

• Youth Group
• Religious Ed
• Service Opportunities
• Lifestyle
• Opinion Page
• Self-Help

The optimal number of these top levels will ultimately depend upon the size of your Parish Web site, but I would suggest going at least two (2) deep.

Sub-level folders will end up containing the majority of your pages, and should be broken down using some type of categorization. For the sake of discussion, we will continue our example by looking at the possible categories of folders we could use under Religious Ed. Here is where we need to be the most creative and forward-looking. In the beginning, under Teen / Religious Ed, you may only have a calendar with brief explanations of events. Regardless of what you currently have on your Parish Web site, what type of content can you foresee having on your site?

In our example, I am going to create sub-level folders named:

• Content
• Calendar
• Archive

My 'Content' folder will contain all of the content pages from Teen / Religious Ed, while the 'Calendar' folder will store time-sensitive pages and 'Archive' will contain the link pages I create to allow users to access older content on my site.

Within the 'Content' folder, I will create another subset of folders labeled:

• Essay
• Teaching
• Inspirational
• Self-study

Each of these folders will have two more folders

• Printable
• Images

Using our example, a page which contains a scripture teaching focused on teenagers would be stored in:
    Teen/Religious Ed/Content/Teaching

The printable version of the page would be stored in:
    Teen/Religious Ed/Content/Teaching/Printable

And any graphics or pictures that are specific to the page (i.e. not a common element) would be stored in:
    Teen/Religious Ed/Content/Teaching/Images

Don't Move that Page!

The beauty of the internet is that the structure that the user sees is not necessarily the way your files are stored on the server.

Continuing our example, let's assume that your Teen/Religious Ed page highlights an article on the book of Job. When a user clicks through the link to view the entire article, they are taken to a separate page containing the content. When they visit the Teen/Religious Ed page the following week, they find a different article highlighted. The excerpt and link are in the same location, on the page, as was the previous article, but the previous article's directory location has not changed.

When the users click the article link this week, they are sent to the new article, which is physically stored in a different location. Although the user seems to have followed the same path they had used previously, that is not really the case. What the Webmaster has done is move the link to an Archive page, replacing it with a link to new content. It may seem like a minor point, but here is the reason for updating content in this manner: Any links to the Job article are still good links, and anyone who has bookmarked the Job article can still go directly to that content.

This can be especially important if search engines have cataloged your pages. It is a tragedy if someone finds what should be relevant content using a search engine, only to click through to your Parish Web site and find that the content listed is not housed there anymore... or worse yet, the link is a dead end.

Of course, if the content on a particular page is time-sensitive (e.g. calendars and events), you should offer an explanation and an alternative. For example, if the page was a calendar, replace it with a redirect that sends the visitor's browser to the current calendar page.

The main goal of these procedures is to maintain the integrity of links, whether they be internal to your Parish Web site, from external sources (other sites or search engines), or bookmarks in a user's browser. Make it easy for people to get to your content!

Tracking Pages for the Paper-Bound Person

Once your site has grown and the amount of content increases, it can become difficult to keep track of every page. Here is a simple system I call the 3-by-5 Method:

Get a file box for 3"x5" index cards. Make sure it is one that has the cardboard tabs to use as dividers. What you are going to do is set up a filing system that matches your Parish Web site directory structure exactly.

There will be one 3"x5" index card for each page in your Web site. The location of an index card in your file box will correlate with directory location of the page it represents. So if the article on Job (mentioned above) is located in Teen/Religious Ed/Content/Teaching, then that is where the 3"x5" index will be stored.

Following is the information that I recommend including on your index cards:

* URL (complete file location)
example: yourParish.org/teen/religious_ed/content/teaching/02072001_job.html

• Name of the page or article.
  example: Lessons from the Book of Job
• Description of the page.
  example: Examines issues of faith in God through good times and bad.
• Last Update should indicate the date content and links were checked/updated.
  example: 2/07/01 3/17/01
• Links within the page should be indicated. If Nav bars/menus do not automatically update, you should either list the links individually or track versions of nav bars/menus.
  example: Text Body - teen/religious_ed/content/self_study/12012000_prayer.html
  example: End Notes - http://yourdiocese.org/events/teen_retreat2001.html
  example: Sidebar Menu - Teen v.2

Using this simple filing method, you should be able to keep track of all of the pages in your Parish Web site with relative ease. And though it may seem to be an archaic method in light of the topic at hand, it is something that will feel familiar. The intent is to add at least a slight level of comfort to the somewhat daunting task of creating your Parish Web site, while at the same time keeping it relevant and extremely functional.

Wrapping Up Web Site Layout

In this article, we discussed the importance of linking and some basics around the inclusion of links in the pages of your Parish Web site. We then moved on to examine the elements of style, focusing on the 4 Keys to Consistency: (1) Create Standard Page Templates, (2) Identify Common Elements, (3) Use Cascading Style Sheets, and (4) Create a Style Guide. Finally, we focused on designing your site's directory in order to accommodate growth, while maintaining stable file locations to ensure valid links and bookmarks.

As I stated in Articles I and II of this series, the interconnectedness created by effective linking, the professionalism depicted by consistency of style, and the stability manifested through maintaining relatively static URLs for individual pages are three of the factors which differentiate a good Parish Web site from a great one!