Virtual Cafe

While there are lots of software packages that make website creation easy, the most professional sites are done by designers and teams that go through all sorts of planning from the structure to the graphics itself. Covered here are the steps in planning the website structure so that it will be easier to code.

Plan your Navigation Bar

Just about all home pages have a set of links that take users to all of the other parts of a website. All that is needed in this step is to simply identify them by listing them down. You can list these down on a piece of paper and you do not have to draw any fancy diagrams just yet since that is reserved for the next step. The goal for this is to get the general scope of your structure in preparation for making a more detailed sitemap.

Illustrate a Sitemap

A sitemap is a diagram showing all of the pages that are included in the website. It also shows how each page is linked to other pages. This is necessary not only to know how many pages your website will be, but also help determine what your folder structure will be when you try to link the pages together through coding. There are no real rules in making a sitemap, but one general way to do it is by simply drawing a tree diagram representing each page as a box.

There are lots of CMS systems out there, and several of them don’t cost anything (Unlike most things in life, most of the free ones are actually pretty good) Choose which one to used based on the website you need. This does not list them all. There are a great number of very good Content Management Systems out there from which to choose. Look at the author’s websites to make certain that the CMS you opt for is right for your requirements.

Joomla can be used for many things. You can use it for almost any kind of website. Personal websites, business websites for the small business or large corporation, online publications, and e-commerce. (Note that if you intend to use any CMS for an e-commerce operation, choose a package specifically designed with e-commerce needs in mind, such as Zen Cart or osCommerce.) Simple to install, Joomla’s setup process can be completely automated if your web host has installed Fantastico.

Web Content Management System (CMS) is a web application designed for creating and managing HTML content–web pages. Web CMS is used to manage a large collection of web resources (text, HTML code, images, PHP scripts, etc). Web CMS functions usually include: content creation, content control, content editing, maintenance functions, and functions special to each CMS. In general, web content management software applications provide authoring tools designed to allow users with little or no knowledge of programming languages or markup languages to create and manage content with relative ease. Therefore you don’t have to know anything about HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, AJAX or other fancy codes.

Web content management systems use a database to store content, metadata, or additional data that might be needed by the system. A web CMS usually contains a presentation layer which displays the content to web-site visitors based on a set of templates. A template is a basic page layout that contains content place holders, page styles and other page data that does not change.