Dreamweaver 8 Design and Construction (OReilly Digital Studio)
3.3. Compiling the Outline
Your content cards have one last rabbit for you to pull from their hat. Using nothing more than the labels of your cards, you can cause a surprisingly accurate, working outline of your web site to appear. Start with your first top-level categoryComic Book Reviews, for example. On a blank sheet of paper, write Comic book reviews. Directly underneath the top category, list all the subcategories in the Reviews group, along with their respective sub-subcategories, if there are any. For instance, if your Reviews subgroups are Current and Past, with Superhero and Fantasy/horror/sci-fi divisions under the Current heading, then your outline looks like this so far:
Repeat this procedure for every category in your cards, and you have an outline for the structure of your site. Your outline is the blueprint for production, so keep it in a safe but convenient place, and be prepared to refer to it often.
Each item in the outline represents a single web page. By looking at your outline, you know that the main Reviews page will have links to the Current and Past pages. The Current page, in turn, has links to reviews about superhero comic books as well as fantasy/horror/sci-fi comics. But what content appears on the Superhero, Fantasy, and Past pages, the ones at the bottom of the organizational hierarchy? To answer this question, simply return to your cards, some of which appear in Table 3-1. According to your content cards, the reviews themselves appear on your bottom-level pages, along with cover images and selected panels from the comics.
If, however, you plan to write a large number of reviews, you might bog down these pages with too much content, especially the Past page, which combines reviews of both kinds of comics. You may decide to fill your bottom-level pages with links instead, links that go to individual review pages, one for each particular comic book that you review. All it takes is a minor revision to your outline:
Notice, though, that you're now four levels of organization deep under Current/Superhero and Current/Fantasy. After careful consideration, you decide that you can't justify going beyond the three-level limit in this case, because you don't really need to create separate pages. You can link to reviews of both kinds of comics from the Current page, maybe by dividing the page into Superhero and Fantasy sections. In fact, you like this idea so much that you borrow the same logic for the Past page, and your outline takes the following form:
Now your outline abides by the three-click rule, and the Current and Past pages are more closely parallel, both of which are excellent organizational attributes for any web site, regardless of content. Apply the same kind of thinking to the remaining content categories, and you can't help but build an effective site structure. |