Choose The Architecture For Your Website
A good architecture is essential to let your visitors get around
Choosing how your website is “powered” is an essential step at the start of the production of your website. The way to decide the architecture for your site will depend on what type of site you will be producing.
The following list gives a selection of the main types of website.
1. Blogs
Weblogs, or blogs for short, are the current big thing on the Internet. Most large websites have blogs which act like online diaries. Publishers can quickly post short articles or notes on their blog without having to implement major updates to their website or detract from the main content of the site.
A significant advantage of having a blog is that you don’t have to host it yourself. While this detracts from the whole idea of this website, this is an important consideration to make. You won’t have as much control over a blog hosted by somebody else, but it will be significantly cheaper and you will be able to redirect your domain name to a hosted blog.
Another good advantage of using ready-made software is the speed of security updates. Popular software such as Wordpress is used by thousands of people on the Internet so it has been extensively tested. When a bug or security exploit is found, the community pools their resources to fix it, usually within a few days. The reverse side to this is that whenever a security exploit is discovered, your installation is vulnerable until a fix is released. This is true for all ready-made software, however, and is not restricted only to blogs.
The third advantage to ready made blogs is the availability of plugins, modifications and themes. If you think a feature is missing from your blog, chances are somebody has made a modification to add that feature. This is particularly true of open source software, such as Wordpress. Don’t like the default template that comes with your blog? There are literally thousands of ready made templates that you can download and modify to your liking. The simplicity factor is a big plus for blogs.
2. Reference and Resource Sites
There are two main types of reference or resource sites: those which are frequently updated and those which are not. There is a significant difference between these two types of sites. We will look at an example of each.
2a. Frequently Updated
Seo Moz. This popular website is aimed at experienced webmasters and gives help to optimise websites for search engines. They have a library of articles and tutorials but the content is updated every day. This keeps the site fresh and, more importantly, relevant. In a market such as search engine optimisation, effective techniques change all the time. Seo Moz needs to be updated every day in order to ensure it stays relevant.
2b. Less-Frequently Updated Websites
World Wide Web Consortium CSS Reference. On this website, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3 for short) post the specifications for CSS. Once these specifications have been finalised, they will never change. These types of websites are archives.
Content Management Systems
Reference sites can also be built with ready made software. This type of software is called a content management system (CMS). CMSs allow you to manage your entire website from one centralised system. You can easily change the header or footer, change the default font size or colour or modify some meta information. Like blogs, you can download plugins or find additional themes and templates. There are also many CMSs available for free (open source).
There is an excellent website called OpensourceCMS which allows you to test out many different types of open source CMS. This allows you to take a look at which ones you are most comfortable using. All the CMSs demonstrated on the website are available to for free.
Here are a list of some of the most popular CMSs:
This is not a list of recommendations, just some of the most popular software. Evaluate each one and decide what is best for your needs.
3. Community Sites
Community sites are places where your users can contribute and collaborate. Common examples include message boards and chat rooms. The problem with these types of site is that content is being generated by your users. At launch your site will have no content, so it is hard to get the site off the ground as users are unlikely to want to post on a messageboard that has few posts.
Since community sites will usually use ready made software, the advantages and disadvantages are similar to those of using ready made blogging or CMS software.
4. Services
When running a service site, the previous discussion about finding your niche is particularly relevant. If the service you are offering allows users to check their Google Page Rank, are you really going to be able to offer anything that isn’t available on hundreds of other websites? Chances are that won’t. This is why finding your niche is important before you start to build your content.
Building this type of website is something that you will have to do from scratch. If you are producing a novel service, you will have to program it yourself or comission somebody to do it for you. This is not something for the beginner webmaster.
Related Articles
Tags: More Recent Articles
Stock photography from stock.xchng
Discussion
No comments for “Choose The Architecture For Your Website”
Post a comment