3 Site-building preliminaries

 

This chapter covers

  • Tightly focusing your site’s topic
  • Setting a goal
  • Creating a hierarchy
  • Making good use of links
  • Building an effective menu system

Why preplan your website before you start adding text and images? It’s very simple: specifying your topic, deciding on your primary goal, and creating the hierarchy for its pages informs many decisions that you make later.

If you just jump right in and start adding content, it’s almost impossible to effectively focus the site and know what to prioritize. For most of us, that results in an unorganized and chaotic workflow. And the likely outcome is an unorganized and confusing website.

Throughout this book, we’ll describe how to build and modify a practice site. This way, you’ll see how to apply—via real-world examples—the various concepts introduced in each chapter. However, you can just apply the concepts directly to your own website if you prefer.

3.1 Focusing your site

3.2 Specifying site goals

3.2.1 The 10 types of websites

3.2.2 Five questions to answer

3.2.3 A consultation with Claude AI

3.3 Create a hierarchy

3.3.1 Site structure: Parent and child pages

3.3.2 Ask AI to create your page hierarchy

3.3.3 AI can create an entire site for you

3.3.4 Using menu plugins

3.3.5 Making the menu brief, simple, and clear

3.3.6 Ask AI to simplify your menu

3.3.7 Menu alternatives

3.4 Avoiding long-scroll

3.5 Make good use of links

3.5.1 Links are valued by site visitors and designers alike

3.5.2 How to create the four types of hyperlinks

3.5.3 Using buttons as links

3.6 Managing your menu

3.6.1 Customizing your menu

3.6.2 Making child page menu links

Summary