Anatomy of a web site

Plan your website

I always tell clients "no problem" when they ask for something. They seem mystified that everything seems so simple to me. It's not rocket science or C programming - it is just basic mark up language for the most part. I did want to discuss however what I like to call the anatomy of a web site.

The parts make the whole

The parts of a current standard adherent website are the actual text content, the images, the html markup and a stylesheet to put it all together. As you get more sophisticated, there are different kinds of scripts that control various advanced interactions such as contact forms, image galleries and the like.

  1. Content
    This is the most important part of your site if you expect people to find you by search engine. Search engines like words — and just not any words, but words that are germane to the topics people are searching for. Consider the phrase "key word rich". If you are selling widgets, you want your words to repeat the word widget a lot through out the site. Not in a vulgar way, but through meaningful content. This is what makes search engines happy and what makes them send visitors to your site.

    I sometimes get content that was composed by a professional writer. This is good for newspapers and magazines, but not necessarily for the web. In the case of widgets, the professional writer might not feel the need to be repetive — that is not proper writing style — instead they would stick to a more print oriented presentation. This is not good for search engine exposure. Also, text needs to be written, at the most, at a high school level. Unless you know your only clients will be highly educated, you don't want to confuse or talk down to them.

  2. Images
    Images should only serve to enhance, not to substitute for quality content. If you are using pictures of your words, they are useless — search engines ignore pictures unless someone is doing an image search.

    Also, images should be web-friendly. You may be on a high speed internet connection, but not everyone is. Picture should be compressed and of a decent size - not too big but big enough if you know what I mean.

  3. HTML Markup
    This is the actual web page that people see when they are at your site. This could be in several languages depending on what your web host has installed on their servers (ie: html, php, asp). But they all do the same thing — bring the content, images and style sheets together to create the page your viewer sees.

  4. Stylesheets
    Stylesheets are used to control the way your site looks. It used to be if you wanted to change the background color of a site, you would need to change it on every page on your site. Not that bad if you have a five page site, but what if you have a hundred page site? Now, most web designers control all aspects of the site with one stylesheet that controls every element on the page — from background colors to fonts and everything else. This saves a lot of time if you decide you want to change one common element on your whole site.

Everything needs a home

There are several parts to displaying a web page after you have it built. This is where it gets a bit trickier. As with the web page built above, there are several parts to getting your site displayed — a domain name, a web server and access to the web.

  1. Domain Name
    This is the name you will be giving to people to go to your site, and the page search engines will use when they send someone to your site. Make it meaningful, easy to remember and as short as possible.

  2. Web Server
    You may have a web server sitting in your office, but most people do not. 10 years ago, web hosting was expensive. Now it is the cheapest part of your web budget. Be careful when you shop for hosting though. Some companies are fly by night, do not have good customer service or are overselling. Also, you need to be sure the host supports the type of scripting you may need for your site and that they provide database capabilites should you need it now or in the future. Don't think you need Windows hosting if you use windows on your computer. I prefer linux hosting for it's reliability and it doesn't matter to the web page which operating system the server has installed.

  3. Access to the Web
    This is your service provider. Mine happens to be Verizon, but there are lots of them out there. Although your website works fine if you can't access it, anyone who looks at it has some service provider that they use.

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