Dreamweaver CS4 Advanced

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When we start with a serious website project, it's important to understand what it is we're actually trying to achieve. There isn't really a formal definition of what a website is or isn't. There are some terms that we associate with browsing the web that are pretty well established. For example, the concept of a domain such as KnowledgeCity.com has been around since the earliest days of the internet, some 40 odd years ago, and it's simply a collection of computers, a collection that can be as small as one, where internet accessible files are stored. From web design, we have the idea of a document, a web page, if I open up a blank file and dreamweaver, I see that I have a document type declaration here, so each of my web pages is a particular document, and that concept is pretty well established. But the idea of what a website is has no real formal definition. In general, a website is a collection of web documents that are all designed to be viewed as a collection. They tend to be linked to one another, they tend to have some form of interactivity that ties them all together. The best way to regard a website is as a software project, and the creation of the documents and style sheets and scripts that are associated with your website can be seen as a software engineering project. So if it is a software engineering project, then we want to follow software engineering principles in terms of getting our site created. For example, one way of creating software is known as the waterfall model. Now if there are any software engineers looking in, I hear them cringing right now because the waterfall model is considered somewhat old school, but for a fairly simple creation like a website, which is really just a collection of different electronic documents, the waterfall model is as good as any. Within the waterfall model, we start with requirements. We then move on, once we know what it is that our resulting product is supposed to do, we then move on to design. Once we have it fully designed, we move on to implementation, and before we put it live on the web, we want to make sure that we have thoroughly tested it. So in the traditional waterfall software model, we move from one stage to another, although modern software models tend to have certain feedback loops where if you encounter a problem that is saying the design stage, you may decide that you need to go back to the requirement stage and reformulate some things. And as far as whether you have a particular model or pattern where you would like to automatically install these sorts of checks, that is kind of up to you. Really there is nothing easier than going back through these steps in something such as web design, which is really high tech manipulation of text files. So we can start with this sort of sequence here from requirements to design, to implementation, to testing. And then if you encounter problems, you can always go back and redo whatever it is you need to do at each of the steps. So what we are going to do in our website project, we are going to start thinking in terms of what is this site required to do. We have a lot of things in mind when we set about creating a website project. First is we probably have a particular topic in mind that we want to explore. If it is a commercial website, obviously we want to use it to promote our company or perhaps even provide an avenue for consumers to buy products from our company, or it may just be to simply provide contact information about the company. If it is a more personal project, then obviously the scope is a lot wider. We may simply be trying to share our expertise. We may be trying to sell a service. We may simply be trying to provide information for those who are interested. The very first step that we need is determining who exactly is this website for. Once we know what the website is going to be about, we need to think in terms of our audience. There are a number of different estimates with regard to how many people have access to the internet and therefore the web. Estimates generally range in the area of about 1 billion people. Now all of these 1 billion people are going to have different needs, desires, different things that are going to attract them. So it is usually best to target your site towards some subset of them. So you want to think in terms of who is the audience for my website. A good way to start is thinking about your topic and thinking about whether your site is aimed at people with a lot of experience and knowledge in your topic or people who are somewhat new to your subject. Whether or not you aim toward one division of that audience or another, it really affects the kind of content that you are going to come up with. Another thought is what is the age of my audience? Are they going to be young people or are they going to be older people because you are going to want to change your language as far as how you address that particular audience. Now when you focus a site at a particular audience, there is always the consideration that the rest of the internet is looking in as well. You don't want to ignore the people who aren't your target audience because anybody coming across your site may happen to know someone who is in your target audience. And whether or not a recommendation to visit your page is passed along to someone who might really be interested and might be the sort of person you are trying to get a hold of, really depends on how well you have adapted your site's contents. So it is somewhat of a balancing act. You definitely want to provide the information to your target audience as quickly as possible. But you also want to keep in mind that just about anybody can access any site on the web and you want to keep them in mind as well. Give them enough information about what it is your topic is about and who the information is aimed at so that if a person decides, hey, this site really isn't for me, they might keep it in mind in case they come across somebody who is a good match for your information.