Dreamweaver 8 Design and Construction (OReilly Digital Studio)

What is a web site? What an odd question. If you're reading this book, you probably have a very good intuitive understanding of what a web site is. You've used the Web often enough. You may visit dozens of web sites every day. But when you cast your initial hunches into cold, hard words, you may find yourself on unsure footing. What is a web site, anyway? Is it a kind of high-tech book? Interactive TV? A repeated request for your credit card number?

Asking this question begs another: what exactly is the Web? The answer to this one is much more straightforward. The Web is an information medium. It's a vast network of data about every conceivable subject, from the latest scientific discoveries to financial records to unsolicited political opinions (lots of those) to shopping opportunities for just about anything to photos of you, your family, and your pets. When you hear Al Gore talk about the information superhighway, this is exactly what he means.

You might say, then, at its most basic level, a web site is a repository for information. In other words, it's a source of content. But information is only half of the answer, because information by itself is meaningless. As French philosophers like to remind us, all data require interpretation. An unformed, undigested lump of content is about as useful as an endless string of digits. If you look hard enough, there may be some underlying meaning or purpose, but who has the time or the patience for that? You're not a computer. You have better things to do.

Here is where web architecture comes in. A web site is no more a chunk of content than a building is an undifferentiated pile of bricks. The magic is in the organization, the architecture, if you will, of your virtual building. Without it, your site is an undecipherable jumble suitable only for wind talkers and tax attorneys.

You need to take the web site's raw materialthe information that it containsand organize or structure it in a way that makes sense to human beings. Instead of dumping a load of content on your visitors, you dole it out piece by piece. You break it into different categories and spread it out over a number of pages. You make it easy for people to find the specific bits that they want. More than that, with a sound structure in place, your web site is better able to withstand the never-ending ebb and flow of information. The top headlines of your favorite news site may change by the minute, but the location of this information is always right up front, just where you want it (and where you would expect to find it). The degree to which your web site's content is organized in an intelligible way is the degree to which your web site succeeds. This chapter gets you thinking about the structure of your site-to-be and leaves you with some practical tips for bringing order to the chaos.