Building Tips

Building your website can be a long and sometimes very tedious process (take it from me!). Hopefully be taking some of the following advice, it might be a bit easier.

Firstly, don't forget your original content plan. As you create each section, make sure you know what pages will contain what information. Keep things logical - if you're confused, how do you think your visitors will feel?

Begin by taking your prototype file (now tweaked to death) and working out what needs to be changed in individual pages. For a simple site, you may just need to change the title and body text. You may want to highlight these using HTML comment tags.

Use that template as the basis for all your files, copying and pasting it as many times as required.

Remember that if you create a directory you'll have to update your template so that relative paths still point to the correct files. It may be worth creating several templates for each directory level, rather than having to recode the paths each time you use a new directory.

HTML Editors

When first getting to grips with HTML, I wholeheartedly recommend Notepad for all your coding. However, when it comes to larger projects a specialised HMTL coding editor can have many advantages. While still having complete control over the HTML (unlike with WYSIWYG editors), they have some very useful additional features:

Obviously each program has its own specialised features but you're sure to find one that suits you. For links to some of the most popular editors (many of which are free), click here.

To see a screenshot of a typical editor, click here.

Keeping Track

Whenever coding a large site I always find that I am constantly thinking of things to do, update or correct. To keep track of all these quick points, I jot down notes in a "To Do" text file. I always surprise myself by looking in the file and remembering things that I would otherwise have forgotten!

Keep it Fun!

Just typing in endless content is very dull, especially once you've done all the fun designing sections. To stop it getting too boring, don't do all the interesting pages at once or you'll just be left with loads of dull pages to do. You could get so bored that you give up on the whole site!